Category: Innovation Examples & Lessons

Ways to Innovate your Product or Service – Add, Subtract, Differentiate.

  If you are looking for product or process innovations then try some mathematical operators – add, subtract and differentiate. What can you add to your product, what can you take away and how can you differentiate? Let’s look at how Ryanair used this approach to take on the established airlines. Michael O’Leary, the founder of Ryanair looked at the whole business process of... Read More--

When the conventional no longer works, try the controversial

The New South Wales Road Traffic Authority ran a highly controversial and highly successful campaign against speeding. Previous campaigns featuring accidents and dangers of speeding had had little effect. The new campaign showed women shaking their little finger – a gesture used to symbolise a small penis – as speeding male motorists race past. The gesture caught on and this edgy campaign... Read More--

Why does the Innovator have such an Odd Body?

Successful innovators and entrepreneurs need big hearts and smart brains.  But that is not all.  They also need to have some rather peculiar physical attributes.  These include: a) A thick skin – to rebuff the criticisms and complaints from everybody who is against the plan. b) A big head – enormous self-belief will be needed to carry the idea through to completion. c) Excellent eyes... Read More--

Customers can be an important source of innovative ideas. So observe them.

It is good to ask customers questions but it is better to observe them in action.  Many companies conduct conventional customer surveys and focus groups. These are useful channels of feedback but in terms of original ideas they are often disappointing. Customers are good at demanding incremental improvements in products, lower prices and better service but they are notoriously poor at predicting significant... Read More--

Do you have any CAVE men in your office? Colleagues Against Virtually Everything.

At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City Dick Fosbury amazed the audience when he did something revolutionary in the high jump – he went over backwards. The traditional way of jumping was to use the straddle where you jump facing the bar. Fosbury’s innovative method won him the gold medal but in the next few years most of the top athletes did not copy him. They had too much time, effort,... Read More--

Adopt an Idea from Elsewhere and Adapt it for your Business

Clarence Birdseye Adapting ideas that work in one environment and using them in another is one of the most successful of innovation techniques. In 1916 a young American scientist and inventor called Clarence Birdseye went to Canada as a fur trader. He noticed that people in Labrador kept their food frozen in the snow for extended periods in the winter. When he returned to the USA he developed this... Read More--

Try coming at the problem from a different direction; think laterally

Lateral thinking is a phrase coined by Edward de Bono in contrast to conventional or vertical thinking. In conventional thinking we go forward in a predictable, direct fashion. Lateral thinking involves coming at the problem from new directions – literally from the side. De Bono defines the four main aspects of lateral thinking as follows: The recognition of dominant polarizing ideas. The search... Read More--

How Great Leaders Empower their people

A young PhD in electronics, Ted Hoff, joined a start-up company in California in 1968. He was the 12th employee in a new venture called Intel. One of Intel’s customers was a Japanese calculator manufacturer, Busicomp, who gave Intel the job of designing the electronic circuits for a new calculator. The job was given to Ted Hoff who had never worked on calculator designs before. Busicomp had specified... Read More--

Why did the Segway fail? Some innovation lessons.

The Segway is a two-wheeled, self-balancing battery electric vehicle invented by Dean Kamen.  It was launched in 2001 in a blizzard of publicity.  Yet it has failed to gain significant market acceptance and is now something of a curiosity.  Production ended in 2020 after selling only 140,000 units over 19 years.  The product is very clever.  It works well.  The company, Segway Inc., had tremendous... Read More--

Check your Assumptions

Every time that we approach a problem, in any walk of life, we bring to bear assumptions that limit our ability to conceive fresh solutions. Our experiences condition us to see any new situation in terms of situations we have seen before. We make assumptions unconsciously and put things into a framework with constraints that limit our thinking. Innovative thinkers are always aware of assumptions... Read More--