Innovation for Everyone
by Rob Zell
Every time I pass the virtual newsstand (think about whatever your online resource is for gathering news or maybe you use an actual newsstand), I see headlines and features broadcasting the importance of innovation. Go to www.hbr.org (the Harvard Business Review website) and search for “innovation.” In the last year, it calls to over 400 articles, blogs, books and more on the topic. Everyone wants to define new markets, leverage customer data in new ways and accelerate growth and profitability and the buzzword to get there is “Be Innovative.”
Innovation is different for everyone. In the end, it revolves around a process for asking questions and looking at problems in different ways. Ultimately, it comes down to making sure you are meeting the guest’s needs. Start by asking your customer or client:
- What’s important to you? What are your priorities?
- What keeps you from being effective?
- What challenges can we help you resolve?
- What need does the product fill?
One thing that restaurateurs know, people don’t just come in to eat. At some level, they are meeting a need deeper than just the need to fill their bellies. They want to be taken care of by a polite server and have a low stress experience. They may want to be seen at the latest, hippest eatery. They may want something high quality but convenient that they can eat on the run and still feel good about their diet. By understanding the need of the guest, you serve the food in such a way that it meets the deeper need.
Another way to innovate is to examine the way the product is manufactured or packaged. Sometimes we put in extra steps or additional options in an effort to create value for the customer. The process may make it easier for you to manage the outputs but if they are invisible to the end user then you might consider removing them in order to either pass savings down to the guest or to your bottom line. Options that are “nice to haves” may also feel to you as big value wins for the consumer. However, if the consumer doesn’t value those options, you aren’t creating loyalty. You are giving them something extra that doesn’t fit their need profile and they are likely to go somewhere else to get the product that matches more closely.
Your group may be adept at developing new solutions, new processes and exploring new markets. How many ideas get off the ground? One obstacle that teams come across is that after brainstorming the ideas are heavily challenged: “it will never work”, “customers won’t pay for that”, and “the employees won’t support that change” are just some of the objections that may arise. One way to address these is reframe the question by asking, “What would have to be true for the idea to work?” By positioning the objections in this framework, you can start to test them in a methodical way and remove them if possible. This technique, found in the September 2012 Harvard Business Review, demonstrated a systematic way to test conditions for success and ultimately launch new ideas with higher stakeholder buy in.
Finally, sometimes innovation means looking at existing structures and asking, “How might we use these differently?” Doing this means tapping into your childlike sense of wonder and view the world through a different lens. Recently I took my kids to a local water park. I watched a young man climb over some ropes to climb into the wave pool, completely ignoring their function: keeping people from entering the pool at that location. You could call him undisciplined or unruly, but he saw the ropes not as a barrier, but rather as a convenient way to climb over the side and lower himself into the pool.
What barriers could you leverage to be more innovative and enter the pool of opportunity?
White Paper: Brainstorming and Reverse Brainstorming by Vicki Wrona
Full Course: Asking the Right Questions (1 day)
Click here for our full list of available courses!
