Tenet of Innovation #7: Understand that ideas come from everywhere

Often, we turn to a few top individual contributors to act as our innovation generators. And these innovators usually have a well-deserved reputation for creative ideas. But sources of innovation for your business and technologies could be waiting for you in the most unlikely places. If you take the time to listen, and sometimes just observe with eyes un-obscured by current assumptions, you may find great ideas all around you. They rest with your customers (and especially with those who are not now and may never have been your customers), your vendors, and even your competition. You may find great ideas outside of defined functional areas … innovative product ideas from your manufacturing product testers or manufacturing process ideas from your product designers.

Depending upon your industry, you might find the neighborhood kids are the creators of hot new innovations. In the ’60s when I was just a kid, my mother showed me how to combine a 2×4 ft. piece of wood and a set of old metal skates to create my first skateboard. It wasn’t very good, and if you hit a rock while riding, you were sure to land on your face. But it was great fun. Perhaps she had made her first when she was a kid in the ’40s. I suppose I thought until recently that she had invented skateboarding! Well, over time, as we know, these simple toys gave birth to a new sport and sporting-supply industry. Or how about Walter Frederick Morrison, who was offered $0.25 for a cake pan that he was tossing on a beach in Santa Monica, CA? On that day, he discovered a new market, and eventually sold the rights to Wham-O, which created the FRISBEE flying disc.

Understand that the innovation we talk about here is not confined to creating new products and services. Opportunities for innovation can be seen in most jobs. Many years ago (when I worked for another company), one of our product lines was faced with a serious parts obsolescence issue. The stakes were high, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. There was no obvious solution to the problem—the direct path would have required the use of modern components, a huge amount of hardware engineering, and a major firmware rewrite. But the product was old, the firmware outdated, the tools archaic, and the original designers long gone to other jobs. It was a manufacturing engineer who came up with a unique solution to redesign the product to allow a translator microprocessor to carry the load of interfacing the old technologies and firmware with the new technologies. Through this process, we were able to give a massive facelift to the product and extend its life for more than 15 years!

Innovation has little respect for boundaries. Interestingly, the more you know about a given business or technology, the less likely you are to think outside of that box and come up with truly innovative solutions. At times, it takes someone who’s not weighed down by a lot of assumptions to create the greatest new ideas, to re-ask the questions that everyone thought were answered long ago. And yet, we continuously expect our best and perhaps only significant ideas to come from the experts, those who have been working in our businesses and technologies for their whole careers. Perhaps this is one of the greatest gifts of the new field of Open Innovation. (See, for example, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, by Henry William Chesbrough, Harvard Business Press, 2005.) For those who are able to harness the power of Open Innovation for their industry and wade through its issues, you may gain access to outsiders, people who are ready and willing to try to solve your problems without being saddled with your company’s assumptions.

Don’t assume great product innovations must come from those in product design or that dramatic business-model innovations must come from the business-development team or executive leadership. Create processes and an environment that encourages the generation, capture, and evaluation of ideas from all sources. As Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” So learn how to gather ideas from everywhere, and then create a great filtering process … the next great challenge!