by Darin Eich, PhD.

Whenever I have described to people what it is that I do, I always expect them to ask me if I’ve seen a Nightline special about the shopping cart. It has happened time and time again. The Nightline Special these people are speaking of is this video about an organization in Silicon Valley called IDEO. This “Deep Dive” special showed people the world of systematic innovation in the context of redesigning a shopping cart. It wasn’t just starting with an idea but rather people saw that there is a deeper design process involved that started much earlier with problems and needs and involved a world of multiple ideas and prototypes. This video helped people to get it and it is clear now that it has stuck over the years. This IDEO process is still relevant and innovative today.

We facilitated a program called “Innovation Trip” where we brought a group of professionals to IDEO in Palo Alto. This was a highlight of the trip. As I talked to many people young and old about their dream career…working at IDEO seems to be the ultimate job for many innovators, inventors, and designers. If this video is still on the top of the mind there must be a good reason why. I am passionate about helping people to learn how to innovate. This starts with having a passionate interest in innovation…and this IDEO Nightline video lit the fire for many people.

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by Darin Eich, Ph.D.

From what I’ve been hearing from many past clients, they are now familiar with many systems and processes for innovation and idea development. What they need now is to develop the “innovation soft skills” so that they can advance their new ideas successfully. This takes better skill in and an integration of the three Cs–Creativity, Communication, and Collaboration–to develop and champion their own innovation projects. We’ve designed a new highly interactive workshop that will leave people with new innovative concepts they create with others to do great work. We debuted this highly experiential 3 C’s of Innovation workshop at the University of Wisconsin and can now bring it to your group as well. Email darin.eich@brainreactions.com for more information about this program.

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by Darin Eich, Ph.D.

If I really want solutions, decisions, or insights I will sleep on the challenge, dream on it in the morning while half awake and half asleep, shower on it, bike to the woods with it in mind, and then hike through the trees and sit on a tree stump to visualize the challenge. I do this all with my idea journal at my side to capture the insights I get. Many people say they get their best ideas when they have thought about the challenge a lot but then stop thinking about it. They sleep, shower, or workout and then great ideas come to them. They disengage from a high level of mental engagement on their problem and let their subconscious mind work on the challenge for them while they do something else…like sleep, shower, or workout! Try some of these techniques for generating ideas. Many times I find that the ideas you get are more highly developed…they are a concept that is more helpful for a solution or decision related to your challenge.

1. Sleep on it. Have your idea journal and a pen next to your bed. Think about your challenge in your mind. Jot down ideas you get in the morning or if waking in the middle of the night.

2. Wake on it. Don’t have to be up early? Linger in bed in a half sleep-half awake state and play with your challenge in your mind. Jot down your ideas in your journal. This is related to lucid dreaming where you have a little bit of influence in your dreams.

3. Bathe on it. Many people say they get their best ideas in the shower. Archimedes had his “eureka” moment in the bathtub. Place your challenge in your mind and then focus on relaxing and bathing. Jot down your ideas when you towel off.

4. Exercise on it. Go for a walk, jog, bike ride, or hit the cardio machine at the gym with your challenge in mind. Have your idea journal handy to jot down ideas.

5. Visualize on it. Get into an awake but relaxed meditative state with your challenge and see where your mind takes you. Jot down ideas.

The key with all of these techniques that are more subconscious/disengaging in nature is that you have your idea sheet ready to capture your ideas at hand because you may not remember them long. What techniques do you use to get your best ideas? How can you let your subconscious mind work on the challenge for you?

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by Darin Eich, Ph.D.

During the past five years I have been immersed in creative thinking resources and reviewed many books on tools for generating ideas. I’ve synthesized and adapted some of the best practice tools that are out there and create some new ones as well. We have tried this system of ideation tools out with brainstormers and I’ve taught it in my Brainstorming Techniques Webinar Program. The recorded webinars facilitate you through the process. I enjoy most doing live webinars or workshops on this too. Here are some of the best books I recommend on using thinking tools for generating ideas.

Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking

Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition)

Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas

Creative Whack Pack

KnowBrainer Accelerated Innovation & Creativity Tool by Solutionman v4.0 (Innovative & Creative Thinking Tool Kit)

How to Get Ideas

It is good to build a library of these ideation books to use in your work. Many of these books are all inexpensive and highly rated on Amazon. I’ve included the price in the image so you can compare cost for building your library.

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BrainWaves is an e-periodical for people who are interested in how organizations cultivate individual and group creativity. Each issue of BrainWaves features information and perspectives about individual and group ideation; how businesses and not-for-profits actuate the best ideas; and reports on remarkable innovations that promise novel solutions to intractable problems. Brainwaves is produced and edited by BrainReactions, producer of “outside insight” — ideas for organizations conceived by outside professional brainstormers and from online brainstorms using BrainReactions.net. BrainReactions also provides innovation training to help companies and individuals generate more and better ideas. 

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In This Issue

• How to Stimulate Innovative Thinking in your Organization to Sustain your Innovation Pipeline for Growth
• The importance of idea communication: A simple visual story of what worked
• Steve Blank teaches us how to go from an idea to market success repeatably
• Frost and Sullivan’s GIL Global Conference

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Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph.D., President, BrainReactions LLC http://www.brainreactions.com

If growth is priority number one, innovative thinking skills should be encouraged and developed at all levels of an organization. Sure, there should be a great emphasis on external or open innovation and many of innovative ideas can come from your customers or other subject matter experts. Nonetheless, it is the employees of your company who will connect those ideas and develop their own ideas within your innovation system in order to fill your pipeline on a continuous basis. The first place to open innovation is within your organization. Imagine what kind of culture of innovation your firm could have if every employee contributed to the innovation process at a place where his/her unique strengths aligned with your needs? A variety of employees can contribute to each stage of innovation by:

1. Providing insight to your research on problems and opportunities — the starting points of innovation—by sharing the voice of the customer with you.
2. Helping to clarify opportunities and focus on specific problems identified by the research.
3. Providing ideas through brainstorming sessions, individual submissions, or company wide idea generating events.
4. Helping to analyze and synthesize the massive amounts of idea collected by using specified criteria or their own wisdom.
5. Participating in a live or interactive web event where employees can view the concepts they developed, and then help select which ones reach the innovation pipeline.
6. Helping to communicate and advance the leading concepts by contributing their thinking to make the message a memorable one.

Do your team members know simple activities they can do in each of these stages? From our experiences, we have found that it is simple and even empowering to equip people with these tools and show them how to utilize them by practicing with real-life challenges. Participating in innovation is something we all enjoy doing—often a reason for choosing our career. People want to develop ideas! In our program, we have turned college students into innovators for innovation leader P&G™ in a handful of training sessions. By doing this, we increase the number of tools they have in their “innovation thinking” toolbox, and build the strength of those tools, resulting in more and better ideas!

How is “innovation thinking” happening in your organization? Who is doing the “innovation thinking”? The simple vision of an organizational innovation culture is to engage as many people as possible — from within their organization as well as outside of their organization — in “innovation thinking” about the opportunities and challenges that they face. Innovation — for those that practice it at its best — is not about one guy in a garage working on an invention, but rather a process where multiple people are collaborating to develop and validate ideas. The opportunity from the top of the organization is to open and catalyze this innovation engagement.

If opening up innovation and innovative thinking within your organization is an opportunity, how do you develop it at all levels and places? We have found that the best way to do this is not to read a book or to listen to a lecture, but instead to engage in developing real-world innovation. Facilitate employees — step-by-step, activity-by-activity — while utilizing different innovative thinking tools, to create and develop their own ideas. What if each individual in your organization had their own personal innovation project? What if employees, along with their colleagues, were invested in the development process of small group projects on a regular basis? We bet it would be good for the innovation culture, employee retention and, most importantly, growth!

From our experience training innovators for Fortune 500 projects, we have found that the most prolific innovators exhibit many innovation thinking skills, including:

• Systems Viewing
• Rapid Iterating
• Quantity Making
• Judgment Suspending
• Idea Funneling
• Deconstructing and Constructing
• Building and Extending
• Connection Making
• Outside Insight-ing

If your organization is at a place where employees at all levels are engaging in innovation in many contexts — such as organizational improvement, product development, communications, etc. — then the next opportunity is to engage the people outside of your organization to collaborate with the developed and engaged innovators on the inside. This collaboration can be powerful for enhancing both “innovation thinking” and results at all stages.

Dell is engaging customers in submitting ideas to them at Ideastorm.com. Intuit has created IntuitLabs.com to show lead users the prototypes they are working on. This effort provides validation and encourages feedback for further development.

In sum, to grow, you need to innovate continuously and sustain this innovation so new and better ideas flow through the pipeline. To have better ideas you need to have a higher quality of innovation thinking from more innovation thinkers both inside and outside of your organization. You can develop this capacity through simultaneously teaching and engaging employees and other individuals in your innovation projects. Start by having a common innovation system that a variety of employees know how to use. Also, have a common format for ideas and how they advance down the innovation pipeline. Then, provide a wide variety of employees with opportunities for real challenges to help them contribute to innovation for actual projects.

About the author: Darin Eich, Ph.D. is President of BrainReactions LLC and founder of InnovationTraining.org. BrainReactions Innovation Training can help you create a program to teach, facilitate, engage, and guide your team step-by-step through this innovation system and over 30 different interactive activities to help you generate ideas and solve your challenges. Email Dr. Darin Eich at darin.eich@brainreactions.com

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Contributed by Anand Chhatpar, Chief Executive Officer, BrainReactions LLC http://www.brainreactions.com

There are many entrepreneurs and corporate innovators in the world who have had a new idea that actually garnered significant success in the market, and yet, they cannot explain what exactly caused them to succeed. Succeeding, but not knowing how they did it, makes it very difficult for innovators to create repeated success stories. This leads to the question: How do we create repeatable innovation success?

From all the research that I have done in this field, I believe that one of the best processes for achieving repeatable success is the one presented by Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur who now teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and UC-Berkeley. His process is described in his book, Four Steps to the Epiphany, and is also popularized as the process of “Customer Development”.

Steve Blank’s lecture at Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Series on this topic has been made into a Podcast, that I would like to share below:

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BrainWaves is a quarterly e-periodical for people who are interested in how organizations cultivate individual and group creativity. Each issue of BrainWaves features information and perspectives about individual and group ideation; how businesses and not-for-profits actuate the best ideas; and reports on remarkable innovations that promise novel solutions to intractable problems. Brainwaves is produced and edited by BrainReactions, producer of “outside insight” — ideas for organizations conceived by outside professional brainstormers and from online brainstorms using BrainReactions.net. BrainReactions also provides innovation training to help companies and individuals generate more and better ideas. 

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In This Issue

• Warren Buffett talks to Charlie Rose about Innovation in America
• Starting innovations: How to make the front end of innovation less fuzzy & more practical
• Innovating Your Professional Life
• Happy Holidays from BrainReactions!

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Contributed by Anand Chhatpar, CEO, BrainReactions LLC http://www.brainreactions.com

A couple of years ago, BrainReactions brought senior executives from developing countries in Asia, South America, and North America together in Boston and Silicon Valley to learn from some of the top innovators in America as part of our Innovation Trip program. The idea was based on the observation that India has access to thousands of engineers, with the same engineering resources online, and even the same engineering text books used in universities as in the U.S., and yet Indian engineers are not able to produce the same innovations in India that take place in Silicon Valley. Google has a number of Indian engineers and even an Indian-American investor, but this innovative company was not created in Bangalore. It was created in California, U.S.A. Our belief is that this phenomenon is due to the ecosystem that exists here in the United States.

Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, re-iterated this same belief on the Charlie Rose show recently. Buffett has been a guest on the Charlie Rose show several times, and he is always insightful. His most recent interview in November 2009 was no exception. You can view the complete interview if you search for “Warren Buffett” on http://www.charlierose.com

One of the most inspiring parts of the interview was Buffett’s firm belief in America and how the American system fosters innovation by “[unleashing] more of the human potential.” In Buffett’s own words, “And what does that? Well, a rule of law helps. A market system helps. Equality of opportunity helps. All of these things that are still a fundamental part of the American system. As a matter of fact, the American system is now better than it was a couple of hundred years ago, because until the 19th Amendment, we’ve had half the talent in the United States that wasn’t entitled to do much. So we’ve got a great system.”

Buffett’s belief in America’s innovation system was further explained by him later in the interview as well. He mentioned the recession in the early 1980s, when nobody would have guessed that during a time of 10% unemployment in the country, two young entrepreneurs named Bill Gates and Paul Allen would be working in Albuquerque creating an innovation that would become a big part of our future. Similarly, who would have guessed in the early 90s that dropouts from Stanford would create Google, arguably the most powerful company in the world today. Buffett believes that the American innovation system will continue to create innovations and millions of new jobs in the future.

It is interesting to think about how Buffett’s 3-point American innovation system would apply inside your company if you wanted to unleash more of your employees’ potential. Have you created rules within the firm that help innovation? Have you created a market system for good ideas within your company with the right rewards in place? Furthermore, have you provided equality of opportunity for everyone in your company to innovate openly, or is innovation isolated to your R&D group? I hope you give this some thought while designing your company’s innovation system.

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Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph.D., President of BrainReactions LLC http://brainreactions.com

Innovation is creativity with a purpose. It is not only creating new ideas but doing so with a specific intention in mind and with plans to actually launch the developed and realized ideas into the world. There are elements of both creation and action. Innovation should be simple, understandable, and open for a wide variety of people to engage in the process. Innovation is becoming more open, less closed door R&D sessions, and more engagement of actual customers, stakeholders, subject matter experts, and employees at all levels in the process. Many organizations know how to launch and sell their products and services but are “fuzzy” on the front end of the innovation process: the stages that deal with creating, analyzing, and developing ideas. That is why it is known as the “fuzzy front end.” The key to making this important beginning stage of the innovation process less fuzzy and more practical is through articulating a simple system with activities that a wide variety of stakeholders and collaborators can understand and engage in. The fuzzy front end should be more kitchen table and less scientific lab.

Having a clear system is equivalent to systematically generating ideas on purpose. I will share with you what we have learned while developing a simple “front end of innovation” process that we have been training people in from over 200 companies at InnovationTraining.org. We encourage you to learn innovation through doing it. You can practice and use this process to develop and communicate your big idea in a more systematic and effective way. The projects we have done for a wide variety of companies from P&G and the UN to solo entrepreneurs all use a similar system and activities. They all started with a problem or opportunity, led to brainstorming questions, continued with ideas, and led to selection and development of the best ideas…just like you catalyze your own projects in your own organization.

If you want to develop an innovative idea for your project, where do you start? Start with a proven system of innovation best practices. The diagram above shows the steps involved in a basic innovation system that you can use as a starting point. You will then go about this purposefully with a process or system to develop your ideas into more validated and robust concepts. You would typically generate multiple ideas and then synthesize relevant multiple ideas logically together in the form of a well-developed concept.

It is important to capture and store all of these ideas in one place. Also, great innovations are not solitary work. They are the result of collaborations. Involve others to help you generate ideas, develop the concept, validate the concept, and communicate the concept so that it is meaningful and memorable. An example of the front end of innovation can be found in a brainreactions.net private online brainstorming room, you can pose your question, provide background information, visuals in the form of a photo or video, and generate ideas. With the online brainstorming room you can include up to five brainstormers and these brainstormers can not only generate ideas but also vote, select, and sort the best ideas to move forward and develop. This is a way to involve collaborators in your innovation system.

An important start to an innovation project is to crystallize the problems and challenges that you intend to solve. You must pose important questions that are grounded in the problems or opportunities for innovation. Google launched a campaign that solicited concept ideas to change the world. To use Google’s Project 10^100 framework as an example, they offered seven suggested categories and questions:

1. Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
2. Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
3. Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
4. Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
5. Health: How can we help individuals le ad longer, healthier lives?
6. Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
7. Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?

These are examples of categories and related questions to start. These categories were selected because they offer real problems and opportunity. These are starting places, if your vision is to “change the world” then the seven Google categories and questions may be beneficial starting places for you. Odds are that your questions and categories may be different and related to the problems or opportunities that exist for you or your organization, specific to your mission. These starting places are big questions of their own or can catalyze sub-questions for you to purposefully generate ideas on.

Action to take: Clarify a simple system you will use to innovate. Use the model we are presenting or customize your own. Know that you are engaging in a system to innovate and what that system is. Identify and write down the areas you would like to innovate in. These are problems or opportunities. Research them. Create questions to ask.

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About the Author:

Darin Eich, Ph.D. is President and founder of BrainReactions LLC that provides innovation training through InnovationTraining.org

This activity is a part of BrainReactions Innovation Training. BrainReactions Innovation Training can teach, facilitate, engage, and guide your team step-by-step through this innovation system and over 30 different interactive activities to help you generate ideas and solve your challenges. You can learn our techniques and activities to do again and again on your own and contribute to a sustainable culture of innovation within your organization. Email Dr. Darin Eich at darin.eich@brainreactions.com to inquire about bringing training and facilitation into your organization or to do an event to capture the ideas of your employees, customers or stakeholders.

Do you want to learn more about systematic innovation? The Systematic Idea Generation for Innovation 4 part online workshop series has been popular with 200 different companies seeking to learn the language of innovation and generate new ideas. You can start this webinar series today at http://innovationtraining.org.

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