When you have an idea and make the idea public, one of three things will happen, and what you should learn from each one…
1. Everyone will ignore the idea – What could this mean… Your idea did not fill a need or a desire. The conditions may not be prime. Learn from this experience by studying current social and market trends, including basic human needs. Every idea must fill a core human need.
2. Someone will unsuccessfully copy the idea – In other words, they end up creating an inferior product and yours remains the better of the two, and gains greater traction. Learn from their mistakes. Other people’s mistakes often give us an insight into the strengths of our ideas, giving us even a greater opportunity to leverage on the strengths.
3. Someone will successfully copy the idea – They steal the idea and make it better. If you have no option for legal repercussion – learn from their success, your failure, and move on.
Takeaway: Learn from each scenario, whether or not your idea was a success.
A truly innovative idea must fill a specific human desire and need.
If an idea lacks value by not filling a need, it is only a novelty item and cannot be called an Innovation. An individual can be highly creative and find an innovative household solution, yet lack the capacity to market their idea as a real-world, useful solution – an Innovation.
Not enough time is spent developing ideas that are useful.
Innovation is the successful exploitation and execution of the opportunity of an idea within a business model.
Innovation – This is the space following an idea generation session (creative thinking, brainstorming, etc.). Innovation deals more with quality, evaluation and implementation. It’s an idea that has the proper resources supporting it and ideal market conditions ahead. Innovation is about moving a novel idea into an idea of value that fills a specific need. Identifying an innovative idea can be a creative process.
Idea Generation – The generation of ideas. This deals with quantity and novelty. This is what we typically refer to as Creativity.
Opportunity – An opportunity looks at and depends on resources (capital, staff, sales team, etc.), and conditions (consumer need & desire, idea value, competition, timing, etc.)
Bottom Line: Innovation is when a highly creative person becomes a successful entrepreneur.
No entrepreneur wants to waste their time developing a business idea that will only end up flopping. Here’s a simple test to determine whether your idea has a chance of becoming valuable and desirable, or you’re just wasting your time and resources.
The above drawing takes into account two factors, PR value and Needs value.
Bottom Left -If your idea falls into this quadrant, just stop. No one will ever buy your product, nor will the press care for the lack of a story.
Top Left - This quadrant can be described as the typical publicity stunt without the proper backing. The story is great. PR loves it. Mass exposure is achieved. But the immediate rise is short-lived after the public realizes your product is without value and doesn’t fill an actual need.
Bottom Right – A great idea without PR support is paved with a journey of an uphill push. Eventually the product will make it into the mass market, only after it’s passed the chasm.
Top Right – If you’re story or idea is newsworthy, it is the best free advertising anyone can get. If you’re story is really good, it will spread like wildfire through blogs, tweets and likes. A great idea coupled with immediate publicity equals a true winner.
Bottom line, as you come up with ideas, make sure people will buy it and there’s an interesting story behind it for the press to eat up.
This is genius innovation! A labeling system that reacts to the product and tells a story.
Consumers are conscious over the quality of food products they purchase, and often the concern is just as equal over the legitimacy of food labels.
To solve this problem, To-Genkyo designed a food label that changes color by reacting to ammonia given off when food is spoiling. If the product is no longer edible, the change of color makes the barcode non-scannable.
Innovators 2.5% – These are the ground-breakers, the risk-takers, the creative thinkers and entrepreneurs whom by nature are designed to change the world.
Abductive Reasoning is at the heart of Creativity, including Innovation, Design Thinking, and all other methods and visionary goals. The most ground-breaking ideas resulted from looking at a set of seemingly unrelated components.
Abductive reasoning typically begins with an incomplete set of observations and proceeds to the likeliest possible explanation for the set. Abductive reasoning yields the kind of daily decision-making that does its best with the information at hand, which often is incomplete. (Source Link)
Our imaginations follow this type of thinking pattern. It is ideas and thoughts that at first appear absurd and ridiculous. Einstein regularly experimented using this method to explore the world around him.
Action: Using small note cards, write down anything that captures your attention during the course of a week (things, objects, ideas, products/services used, food consumed, tangible, intangible, etc.). At the end of the week, take the inventory of cards and force yourself to find relationships, trends, opportunities and ideas – regardless of how ludicrous that may be.
