Idea generation

My previous posts have focused on how to drive value from your portfolio of innovation and change activity, but I haven’t talked about how you build that portfolio in the first place.

So where do ideas come from - in my experience the volume of ideas doesn’t tend to be an issue, but are they always generated from the same sources and how diverse are they?

Some of the obvious sources might be:

• Necessity – you have infrastructure that is outdated, performing poorly or insecure and needs upgrading, or regulation has changed and demands changes in process/tools.
• Competition – watching competition and new entrants and copying their offer or extending current offer to protect position
• Accidents – perhaps an organisation with a research function will accidently come up with an offshoot opportunity that can be pursued
• Shock event – a major change in your sector or the wider economy meaning the way we work and the way we think needs to change, something we have all experienced in recent times
• Strategic imperative – a service or change has been identified in the strategic roadmap that is a clear gap today and so needs to be implemented or the strategy will fail

But what other opportunities are there to generate innovative ideas to throw into the hopper?

• Customers – how often do you assess your customer journey and look for opportunities to make it better, is the customer engaged in this process, are they and your front-line staff asked what they want, and is the way they interact with your services thoroughly assessed?
• Co-collaboration – are you collaborating with any third parties, suppliers or even competitors, to produce a new product or service that simply wouldn’t be possible or wouldn’t have the reach if undertaken alone?
• Knowledge – is knowledge development actively supported, are people and teams given the time and space to expand and deepen their knowledge, creating opportunity to think differently, challenge the status quo and potentially push barriers?
• What If analysis – do you have a team (internal or external) that has the specific objective to explore alternative futures, to ask the question ‘what if’ and explore what this could mean, regardless of how off-the-wall the question may be?

Is your organisation trying all/some of these sources and how successful are they? Where else have you seen successful ideas come from?