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

We have heard from many people that the importance of communicating your idea is becoming of critical importance! It is the communication that takes the idea into action. Many times, we have a great idea, and we’ve developed it thoroughly, but we are unable to communicate it so that it gets advanced. Odds are, we didn’t communicate it in a way that works with people’s minds. They didn’t get it so they didn’t feel comfortable being a part of it. The answer is simpler. Tell a story. Make it visual. Make it understandable. Help them get it. You should be able to do it in one sheet.

Here is an example. We launched a new training program on idea communication. People had to “get it.” To convey the concept, I had the idea of telling a simple visual story, with me as the main character, through a comic. I chose myself because I know that character well and because I had a few photos of myself! You innovate with the resources you have, right? The comic was easy to make with a few pictures that could convey some situations that we can all relate to. I knew the comic would gather attention because as I was building it at a San Francisco coffee shop, I had two strangers come up to me to ask me what I was doing. This has never happened with writing text! Here is what I created:

From this one visual sheet a person should understand the value of this training. See how we communicated this new training workshop and even participate in the webinar program in a simple visual website at http://ideacommunication.org. Once you create the story and visual, you can use it for articles, the web, live presentations, etc. We launched the training program and it was our most successful yet — so the communication achieved the real ultimate action outcomes we needed.

If you are taking idea generation and innovation seriously, you should take idea communication really seriously because it is what prevents our ideas from happening! These are idea communication problems you may face in your work or organization:

• A great idea doesn’t go anywhere because people don’t understand it or are not motivated to collaborate on it.
• New ideas don’t get put into action internally or externally.
• A new product or service launch requires new and more creative ideas than before.
• Change is happening faster and new communication ideas are continually needed.
• You need to present and persuade with your ideas simply and memorably so others can take a risk.

We would like to help you not only with your idea generation & development but now with your idea communication too so you can bring your innovation into action. Visit http://ideacommunication.org to see more about our training on this important topic. We can bring it live to your organization or you can participate in the recorded webinar program whenever you are ready.

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Gen-Y ideas, New Concepts & Ideas, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

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

Sometimes we assess our professional lives and realize that we have just been operating a metaphorical machine for an extended period of time. This machine may not even be a real machine but what we discover is that our work, our organization, or our processes have become a bit stagnant or repetitive. We lose our excitement or even hope for the future because nothing is changing. We are doing the same thing every day, every month, and every year and this has become bothersome. We are doing precisely the same service, making the same product, doing the same marketing, giving the same speeches, and asking the same question every month and every year. When this repetitive stagnation happens it not only adversely affects our professional life but also seeps into our personal life. Hey, most of our personal lives revolve around our professional lives anyway, so when that isn’t good, little else is. What people need is change. This is the first thing. Staying in ruts is no fun, getting out of them is.

But change for what? Just change for the sake of change? Well, if we are stagnant, sometimes even change for the sake of change is a good thing because it starts an action. It will add a little bit of air and movement to break the stagnation and stops the mold from growing. But what is powerful, what can be downright compelling, is change when you have a vision, change when you see a potential for a purpose, change when there is a goal that attracts you and others like a magnet. When there is a new challenge, this awakens something in you. It may be fear, but that usually comes about first anytime change happens. So, connected to that fear is excitement and also a newfound hope and perhaps, invigoration, in your professional life. This vision, this purpose, this goal gives you a destination to strive for. It gives your mind a reason to start thinking again. This can be invigorating for anyone!

What is the ultimate for a person’s professional life is this thing called innovation. Innovation is changing. Innovation has a goal, a goal to get better. Innovation can happen in a lot of different contexts. You can innovate new or existing products. You can innovate your marketing. You can innovate your services. You can innovate your business processes. You can innovate your organization as a whole. Most compelling, motivating, and inspiring is that you can also innovate yourself as a person. Yes, all of these things have the capacity to change, to grow, to develop, and to improve in slight ways and in ways that you can’t even tell the difference!

Work and organizations can be stifling. People complaining about their jobs and companies are as common as conversation. Some of the people who work at the large established bureaucratic organizations are full of great life though. This is because they work in innovation. They are concerned with innovating products, services, and everything else. They look to innovate everything they see and realize that they, with others, have the capacity to actually do it. They have that challenge, that goal, that purpose, and that vision in their professional lives and I can see the difference in these people. My conclusion: innovation is good for a person and involving yourself and others in innovation in your organization and life is a positive change.

Where do you go from here?

1. Assess. Is your professional life stagnant? Is there a lack of change or growth in the stuff that you do and in your organization, heck…in your own life too?
2. If you assessed that yes, change is needed…well change for what? What can be changed for the better? A product, service, process, organization, or you? Perhaps all of these things could use innovating.
3. What is the purpose connected to a vision connected to a goal for this change?
4. Start innovating.

OK, so what does “start innovating” mean? To say “I’m going to innovate” is exciting, certainly. Saying this to yourself in the mirror each morning is a little weird but will probably have some good effects. I’m a leadership geek. I’ve studied leadership for a number of years and it is a really fuzzy thing that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Innovation is similar to leadership. They both have some similar meaning and they both get a “huh” response when you ask people for a definition. What I’ve found to be helpful is to take this fuzzy concept and break it down into its parts. So for innovation, let’s break it down into some different stages. Many different organizations and individuals define innovation in different ways, have different systems, and have different parts of these systems. In general though, some similarities exist.

Let’s break it down simply.

Stage 1: Identify the opportunity or problem that will lead to the innovation. This requires some hard thinking and some research. What exactly is it that you are trying to innovate? Is this the correct thing that you should be going for? Make sure that the “innovation for what?” question is answered here and gather a fair amount of information. This is your background research stage.
Stage 2: Formulate questions. Because you’ve done stage one you should have a much more thoughtful understanding of the situation, problem, or opportunity. Start breaking that problem down into it’s pieces and formulate corresponding questions. So, if the problem is that nobody knows about your organization and thus cannot do business with you, a simple “how can we get more people to know about our organization?” is a question that can be broken down into “who do we want to reach”, “what we want them to know,” “how do we communicate this message,” “how can we use the internet to communicate this message,” etc. There are a lot of ways you can break down the problem once you’ve gone through that first stage of understanding it and thinking about it.
Stage 3: What I like best; it is the “coming up with a bunch of ideas” stage. You do just that. Take each question, organize them in a way from more general to more specific, and come up with a bunch of ideas for each. Utilize many different ways of coming up with ideas from just writing some down on your own to using a group brainstorm if possible. The goal here is to literally come up with hundreds of ideas.
Stage 4: Make meaning of all those ideas you came up with and analyze them.
Stage 5: Develop some solid concepts in greater detail.
Stage 6: Test out those concepts and develop them further based on feedback.
Stage 7: Take action and do what you had set out to do in the first place. Execute the marketing plan to increase awareness about your organization, if we refer back to the previous example.

Innovation is fun work and also challenging work. It is much easier to do if you can break it down into the stages and take each stage at a time. Many times organizations start but don’t finish. So do each step at a time and make sure you move up the steps and finish and actually take action! If you go through the stages what you will be taking action on should be pretty good because you studied and clarified the problem, you formed great questions, gathered a number of ideas, made meaning and analyzed the ideas, developed solid concepts, tested those concepts and improved them even more. This leads to a breakthrough innovation! Start innovating!

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, Managing Generation Y, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

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. 

---

SUBSCRIBE TO BRAINWAVES

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

FORWARD TO A FRIEND

---

In This Issue

• Innovation and New Product Development in Do-It-Yourself Healthcare
• Healthcare Innovation using the Web
• 100 Tips for Improving Your Creativity: Top ideas from 15 different brainstormers
• Frost & Sullivan’s GIL conference on Growth, Innovation and Leadership
• Use short online surveys to gain direction and validation from your stakeholders before generating new ideas

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed by Anand Chhatpar, CEO of BrainReactions LLC

The healthcare industry has been quite resilient to economic downturns and is expecting to see a growth in the market largely due to the large, affluent and aging “baby boomer” population. Several technological innovations are springing up in the healthcare industry to take advantage of this growth. This article is a showcase of innovations in the healthcare industry that are Internet based.

I have presented below online healthcare innovations in various categories that could help consumer patients and medical practitioners.

1. Online access to physicians and health experts:
http://www.hellohealth.com/ The site allows you to talk to health experts, schedule appointments with doctors, do virtual meetings with them and even do follow-ups online.
http://www.zocdoc.com/ Free website that helps you find and schedule appointments with local doctors. http://www.justanswer.com/ Ask a question and get an answer from qualified health experts or doctors. This site is not free, but is quite inexpensive to use.
http://www.americanwell.com/ Online care for consumers that provides 24×7 access to physicians. The cost of using this service is not clearly indicated on their website.
http://www.freemd.com/ Interact with a virtual video doctor who asks you questions about your symptoms and makes a recommendation to you.

2. Tools for self-service healthcare management:
http://www.sugarstats.com/ Helps you keep track of your sugar levels to manage your diabetes on your own.
https://www.mymedlab.com/ Helps you schedule and order clinical tests on your own. You can go to a local lab to give a sample and get the test results online.
http://doublecheckmd.com/DTHome.do Helps you find out if any symptoms or abnormal lab tests are caused by drug interactions or side-effects.
http://engagewithgrace.org/Questions.aspx Helps you answer 5 basic questions and lets your relatives know your preferences in case you are debilitated in a terminal illness.

3. Medical information repositories and search engines:
The following sites provide a large amount of information on various symptoms, diseases, preventions and treatments: http://www.webmd.com, http://www.medpedia.com/, and http://www.healia.com/

4. Support groups/Patients helping patients:
People suffering from the same ailment can learn from each other and find a support group that helps. Sites like http://www.inspire.com/ and http://www.patientslikeme.com/ provide that.
http://www.ratemds.com/social/ The RateMDs site helps you review and give a rating to your doctor. The aggregate ratings and rankings for doctors are also available for you to check out.

5. Electronic health records on the web.
Many companies are getting into the space of helping consumers get secure access to their electronic medical records. The following three companies are the major innovators in the field:
http://dossia.org/, https://www.google.com/health and http://www.healthvault.com/

6. Managing costs of healthcare:
https://www.changehealthcare.com Helps consumers track their healthcare bills, compare costs of prescriptions and doctor visits so they can save money.
http://healthcare.intuit.com/ Free health expense tracker that integrates with health insurance plans from Cigna and UntedHealthCare.

7. Social Network for doctors:
Doctors can find valuable insight from connecting with each other and collaborating on certain cases. These social networks are exclusively for physicians: https://www.ozmosis.com/home http://www.sermo.com/

The various web based healthcare innovations featured here are just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible in the healthcare innovation landscape, especially given the pervasiveness of the web today. We expect to see more valuable tools in the future as the internet matures and as technology entrepreneurs focus on capitalizing on the growing healthcare market.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, BrainWaves Emagazine, Healthcare Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed by Dr. Darin Eich, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer at BrainReactions LLC

A BrainReactions.net brainstorm launched by UKJohn (John Tunney) on “100 Tips For Improving Your Creativity” achieved its stated goal. It generated 100 ideas from 26 different brainstormers. The description of this brainstorm was: “I thought it would be interesting to ask BR Tool users for their creativity tips. Any input is welcome - be it favourite techniques, authors, websites, attitudes you think are essential for creative thinking, etc.”

The following are some of the most popular ideas from 15 different brainstormers tagged with the username of the creative global idea generator from BrainReactions.net. Note that the wording of the ideas, including any typos, have been kept intact below in an effort to maintain the originality of the idea as presented by the author:

Go beyond the word that describes the solution to purpose of the solution, e.g. instead of saying “I need a job,” say, “I need an income.” That frees you from confining boundaries. Ask yourself, “What’s the true purpose of this solution? Is there an alternative way to get that?”
-David_Payne

Ask every question you can think of related to the task at hand, problem or opportunity. This “drilling-down” will ALWAYS produce high-quality possibilities and answers – and crystallize your idea, problem or opportunity so you can produce very clear responses.
-ThoughtOffice

Try using outrageous similes to spark your imagination. Think up some, or read some fiction - either good or bad - to see what kinds of “word pictures” authors have crafted. Two I wrote last night: “ditched them like an empty pack of Marlboros” and “parted out like so many broken down Chevy Citations”. Play off the imagery that is inspired and try making some “like a” phrases of your own.
-Dlock

Mindmap your concepts…it is amazing to see all of the little ideas that relate together to make a big idea. This helps to integrate your ideas and helps you develop more robust concepts in the future
-Djeich

Don’t try to innovate in a vacuum. Look around at similar problems in different fields, and see what elements apply. Often, parts of a solution can be found.
-FreshThinker

Read biographies of high achievers in any field and emulate their thought-process.
-Anandvc

Keep a record of ideas, problems and thought experiments. Refer to the record regularly and sometimes memorise the items so that you can think about them at any time at any place.
-UKJohn

have a time limit, say by 10th of this month i should generate 10 ideas. this competitive thinking will enable you to be focussed and will help generate more ideas.
-soorya

Leverage the 4 fundamentals of Innovation: FUNDAMENTAL 1 - Innovation happens at the intersection of domains and fields, FUNDAMENTAL 2 - Breakthrough ideas come from playing with ideas and forming new connections, FUNDAMENTAL 3 - Incubation is a powerful and important part of any innovation process, FUNDAMENTAL 4 – Brainstorming is a skill to be practiced and perfected
-ThinkCubologist

Switch to unlined paper for all of your meetings, brainstorming sessions, and notebook idea entries. It will subconsciously - and consciously - free you to think differently and more expansively. Also, it facilitates more visual drawing of ideas - not just linear verbal descriptions - which is particularly useful for novel, emergent ideas that are still in the process of forming. Once people experience unlined, they don’t go back
-CreativeEmergence

Go to a nice and new environment where you feel happy and excited, and synergize with interesting people there;this gets the creative cells sparkling. Feeling good and sharing your thoughts open many windows of opportunities. The impossible becomes possible.
-Stephens

Go Random. Where ever you are think of at least seven things… anything, no rules. Write those things down without judging or sensoring. You may use visual, auditory, musical or personal reference, For example, the next thing someone says or the next thing you hear on the radio, song or talk show subject. List those seven things and relate them to you end result. How, Why is it related to your issue. Why? This process opens fresh new pathways to success.
-Huemankind

Consider the opposite: Turn the problem upside down; imagine trying to achieve the opposite; reverse the relationships
-Graham

Backwards script-writing: imagine the result of your idea. how will it look? how it will influence on your market? then, go backwards and look for more ideas to make it happen.
-Ranencarmel

Build a rough prototype. It will help focus your goal and serve as a platform for generating more ideas in creating and extending.
-Emooney

Visit the online brainstorm at http://brainreactions.net/brainstorms/1753 to review the ideas, select good ones, and sort to view the most popular. You can also still add your own tips for improving your creativity.

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

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. 

---

SUBSCRIBE TO BRAINWAVES

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

FORWARD TO A FRIEND

---

In This Issue

• Help others Hear and See your Innovative New Concepts
• The Flying Cart Story: Building a business and creating features based on researching customer needs
• How you can take advantage of the recession by starting a business
• Frost & Sullivan’s conference on Growth, Innovation and Leadership is going global!
• Rapid Innovation: The Potential to Utilize Social Media and User Generated Content Create Strategic Competitive Advantage, Differentiation and Elite Brand Experiences

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, Managing Generation Y, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

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

I have been an entrepreneur as long as I can remember. I started my first company, Pyxoft Infotech Pvt Ltd. at age 17 in India. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in my second year in the US, was involved in my second start-up, OZ Innovations and we went on to sell the product internationally in a retail chain of over 72 stores. I was also fortunate to have been named as one of the “Top 5 Entrepreneurs Under 25″ by BusinessWeek and also featured on CNBC TV’s “Young Turks.” Now is as good a time as any I have seen to become an entrepreneur.

This is a great time in life for you to start a new business, especially if you do not have the responsibilities of a family or the pressures of a house mortgage payment. Starting a new business has become much cheaper today because office rent, cost of advertising and cost of employees has gone down. You probably also have a group of friends who would like to work with you and all of you can pool your startup money together. Some of you have ideas, but are hesitant to act due to the fear of making mistakes. Let me assure you that everyone makes mistakes when starting a new business. What is needed to succeed is the will to recognize your mistakes and to fix them quickly. As I learned from my mentors during my internship, “Fail fast to succeed sooner!”

Some of you may not yet have thought about any ideas for a business you can start. My company, BrainReactions http://brainreactions.com, is in the business of identifying new opportunities for entrepreneurs and companies by generating creative new ideas. We not only generate ideas professionally for clients, but we also teach people methods of being more innovative systematically so they can create useful new ideas for their unique situation. Perhaps we can share some business ideas with you here. Although the general sentiment today is quite negative, this is in fact, a great time to use the recession to your advantage.

Not all businesses are suffering in the recession. According to Barry Moltz’s recent survey, about a fifth of all businesses are such that they actually do better in a recession. Such businesses, called “countercyclical businesses”, present great startup opportunities right now. Businesses that help people save money generally tend to be in this category. For example, in a recession, people prefer to buy more groceries or eat cheaper food than eat at a fine dining restaurant. Insurance agents that can save people money on their car insurance premiums also do well in a recession. Funnily enough, in India, astrologers tend to have an increase in clients during a recession. Could you, perhaps, create a new product or service that helps people save money or reduce wastage in their homes and offices?

For new entrepreneurs, it is easier to set up service-based businesses that have a low startup cost. Businesses like web design, tutoring, delivery, event planning service, and a travel booking service are some examples.

Since you are reading this article on a computer, I would assume that you enjoy the Internet and are open to ideas for online entrepreneurship. Sites like eLance.com and odesk.com provide opportunities for freelance writing, graphic or web design, programming, and even simple tasks like data entry and virtual assistance. Similarly, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk at mturk.com pays people for completing simple tasks online as well. If you are good at photography, you can upload good quality photos to iStockPhoto.com and get paid royalties. Metacafe pays users to upload videos that are popular. Sites like ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost.com pay you to write reviews of websites on your free blog. Speaking of blogs, Squidoo.com and eHow.com pay a revenue share to people who contribute articles to their site. SpringWise.com has a database of unique business ideas from around the world that you could spend hours reviewing. The web is a huge resource of business ideas and for reaching out to other entrepreneurs who are available for providing guidance and help for your new business.

To get more new business ideas, I would recommend traveling to a new place that you have not been before, perhaps to a different country if you can. Experiencing a new place and culture can give you tremendous amount of fresh inspiration for new ideas. Also, check out the book called “Successfully launching new ventures” by Dr. Bruce Barringer which features BrainReactions as a success case study in its second chapter. Furthermore, you can double your chances of success by learning the fundamentals of systematic innovation through a four-week online course we deliver via webinars at http://www.innovationtraining.org or get recordings of the training sessions. You can walk through activity by activity the steps to create a solid business concept or new product idea.

I hope that after reading this article you will rethink your career and normal daily job-hunting and actually use some of the ideas and resources that I have shared in order to create your own successful business and create new jobs for our country and our world.

——–
About the Author: Anand is the CEO of BrainReactions LLC, a company that helps companies and entrepreneurs with innovation. Anand has a degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Computer Engineering. He holds 8 issued U.S. utility patents.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, Managing Generation Y, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

David Dalka has been a friend and strong supporter of BrainReactions dating back to our inception. After exiting a small startup last year, David is currently a Marketing Strategy Innovation Management Consultant to senior executives. Darin Eich had the pleasure of talking with David about the exciting and abundant opportunities to utilize social media and user generated content as strategic management team tools!

Darin Eich: What kind of activity takes place on social media and user generated content sites that could become insights for innovation?

David Dalka: People are discussing the products and services you provide everyday on blogs, social media sites like Twitter and user generated content sites like Youtube. The types of people can provide falls into several categories: evangelist about an industry, evangelist about a product or service, people who are passionate about a particular brand (no matter what!), people expressing frustration or dissatisfaction and people who are making constructive criticism.

Darin Eich: That is certainly true, what does this mean for better innovation?

David Dalka: Everything! It has potential not only for innovation, but also the entire way you do business! In the era of Web 2.0 a lot of people have focused on the public relations aspects of social media to promote their products. It is my opinion that the largest opportunities actually are in listening to people expressing frustration or dissatisfaction and people who are making constructive criticism and then acting on that information. The focus should be on how to solve these pain points in the marketplace, improving offerings and creating an elite, innovative brand experience!

In the late 1990’s, I worked at BlackRock (BLK) during its’ growth phase from 80 to 800 employees. At BlackRock we provided daily reports via the Internet for our institutional clients back in 1996 when other firms were still sending out paper reports only 45 days after the end of the month. This created offline conversations and/or emails from these clients for data adjustments and tons of suggestions for adding fields to these reports, changing the reports and innovation that created new reports! The increased cycle time of communication with our customers brought us closer to them and increased our pace of innovation – more importantly it focused that innovation outward towards the customer instead of inward. Our responsiveness to their feedback encouraged even more feedback! This feedback loop was critical in creating the incremental improvements that BlackRock made every day. These improvements over time created substantial competitive advantages that were a direct result of user and customer generated innovation!

Darin Eich: That’s amazing! So you are suggesting that pre-social media era experience is a strong indicator of what can and should be done to create innovation today using these tools?

David Dalka: Absolutely! The opportunities to create a process where you listen, then engage and reform your customer acquisition, marketing positioning and customer service is where the future of competitive advantage has the largest area of opportunity. Is your organization seizing the opportunity? Or are entrenched silos beholden to rigid budgets more suited for 1990 than 2009 over analyzing and delayed decisions? Have a bias for action.

Darin Eich: Who is starting to adapt to this change well? What actions are they taking?

David Dalka: Comcast is certainly making incremental steps in the right direction. A few short years ago a contract installer told Comcast that he completed an installation at my mother’s house when he actually did not. This was highly upsetting. My Mom responded with a guest blog post which made the Digg home page and they promptly removed the charges. Then there was the well known sleeping Comcast employee Youtube video incident.

Several months later a support employee named Frank Eliason approached VP of Communications Jennifer Khoury and asked if he could create a Twitter account and start to proactively respond to the complaints and problems of customers voicing concerns on blogs and/or Twitter. His @comcastcares account has now solved thousands of problems for Comcast customers and Frank now leads a team that is solely dedicated to this. I talked with Jennifer about this at ad:tech Chicago in 2008 to learn more about how this came about and she said she granted him the authority to do that immediately. The decision to allow a bottom up idea to be rapidly implemented is critical. Is Comcast the best customer service organization in the world? Not even close. Is Comcast realizing the mistakes of the past and making incremental strides towards improvement everyday now? Absolutely! And that is what matters, making incremental improvements in the customer experience. They also came back onto that original blog post and left a lengthy comment replying to all the other comments. There hasn’t been another comment on that post since then. Comcast is building credibility. Ultimately a portion of social media is a revolution about a return to good old fashioned customer service, which I’d highly welcome over the only way to get service is to request to close my account option.

Darin Eich: If an organization is looking to strategically innovate with utilizing social media and user generated content, what can they do to start in the right direction?

David Dalka: Why is Twitter working for Comcast? It works because Comcast is listening to and solving customer needs instead of seeing social media as purely a public relations or promotional tool! Strategy without execution is nothing, effective implementation is everything. Empowering your employees towards rapid action instead of 18 months of meetings to make a decision is critical to making incremental progress. Using user generated content, social media and search engine marketing effectively is an incremental process that transforms your entire culture and the way you do business across your organization not something that you have one person do and keep doing everything else the same way! You can’t write a check to a consultant and be done, you have to be committed to change. This means changing customer interaction processes and procedures across the organization. The big one hit solution doesn’t exist. Stop looking for it. You need to get down and roll in the dirt to find the details that can lead to innovation.

Darin Eich: Can you point to an opportunity for a company to utilize customer feedback in this manner to make products or services that improve the customer experience and create competitive advantage?

David Dalka: Sure. I bought a new Acura Integra in 1991 and am I am driving it into the ground – it has 154,000 miles on it. It’s been one of the greatest and highest return on investment purchases I’ve ever made! It’s time for me to buy a new car and I’m an Acura loyal customer for life right? Sadly no, I’m not likely to be. Why? During the 1990’s the engineers at Honda and Acura have forgotten that a significant number of their customers are 6′3″ or taller and the “improvements” that have led to marginal increases in miles per gallon changed the headroom in their sedans to the point where I don’t fit comfortably in one and the current pillar and rear view mirror placements cause dangerous obstructed views. If I don’t buy an SUV from them I don’t fit. To be honest, I am surprised the auto insurance industry hasn’t been more proactive in regards to this emerging issue. Starting way back in the year 2000 I started calling Acura’s customer service number periodically to give this feedback – to date I have yet to see any change in the design. I mean look at this photo showing a 5′6″ reporter in the backseat of a 2010 Honda Insight. I really wanted to consider the new Honda Insight, but myself and tons of other consumers will reject this car outright due to its inferior headroom characteristics. I’ve Tweeted the issue again just now. Will some car company listen to this, design cars that once again serve the comfort, visibility and safety needs of tall people and increase their market share? The opportunity is right there in the tweet waiting for any auto manufacturer to build a great sedan with great headroom and visibility for tall people!

Darin Eich: Other than innovation blogs and e-magazines like this one, where else can you find the thought leaders and resources on this subject?

David Dalka: Your own well thought out search queries on a search engine like Google is the best place to start. If people understand the true strategic nature of the emerging content and search engine optimization opportunities you’ll find them when searching about subjects that you care about! Another great place is slideshare.com, the world’s emerging thought leaders are creating content for lectures, small group meetings and Conferences (UGCX) and put the deck on slideshare.com.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this conversation with Marketing Strategy Innovation Management Consultant David Dalka. Stay tuned for future conversations with David and other innovators in future issues of BrainWaves. Drop us a line to let us know any specific issues you’d like us to discuss in future interviews.

1 Comment | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Managing Ideas, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

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. 

---

SUBSCRIBE TO BRAINWAVES

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

FORWARD TO A FRIEND

---

In This Issue

• How to innovate and brainstorm a better idea to change the world for a share of $10 Million from Project 10^100
• Utilizing the Labyrinth for innovation and convergent thinking in the Conceptual Age
• The Labyrinth: An ancient and emerging tool for idea development
• Review: Frost & Sullivan conference on Growth, Innovation and Leadership

Announcement:

BrainReactions’ most popular webinar, Fundamentals of Idea Generation for Innovation, which has been attended by over 100 companies already, is now available to watch as a video so you can watch and learn from the webinar video at your own convenience. To download this webinar and the related materials, please visit http://training.brainreactions.com

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, Managing Generation Y, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph. D.

Google has committed $10 million to fund ideas from individuals that can improve our world. This article will help you to use best practices for idea generating and innovation so that you may submit a better and more well developed idea to increase your chances for a share of the $10 million and better improve the world. We will pull out key parts of the Google application for topics you can generate ideas around and criteria to use to select and develop your ideas. We will also share with you what we have learned from experience not only crowdsourcing ideas but developing a simple idea generating for innovation process you can use to develop and communicate your big idea in a more meaningful way. We have developed and used this process with similar projects that were geared at improving our world, be it eradicating extreme global poverty with the UN, fundraising for the United Way, helping children’s shelters in developing nations, or bettering our environment. These projects all started with a problem, led to questions, continued with ideas, and led to selection and development of the best ideas…just like you can do with the Google Project 10^100.

In a Google news release they described this project in these terms: “Google is announcing as part of its tenth birthday celebration Project 10^100 (pronounced Project 10 to the 100th), a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. For this challenge we are asking our users to send us exciting ideas for ways to improve people’s lives and have committed $10 million to turn up to five of the best ideas into reality. These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple – but they need to have impact. We will identify the 100 best ideas and then ask our users to vote on which ideas we should fund. Their votes select the 20 finalists, and then a panel of judges will choose up to five ideas for final funding.” For more information, visit: http://www.project10tothe100.com

If you want to submit an innovative idea for this project where do you start? First, practice innovation best practices. You will have to go about this purposefully with a process or system you use to develop a fine concept. This means 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 is meaningful and memorable. In a free brainreactions.net private brainstorming room you can pose your question, provide background, visuals in the form of a photo or video, and generate ideas. With the free 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.

So, how do we come up with a large number of ideas so you can develop a strong concept? First of all, we do it deliberately and purposefully. If you expect a bunch of brilliant ideas to come to you by chance, you are not going to get very far. You have to set out to come up with these ideas; schedule time to do it; plan to do it. Schedule a brainstorm or innovation session time, invite your collaborators, and execute.

An important start to an idea generating for innovation project is to pose important questions that are grounded in a problem or opportunity for innovation. Google’s Project 10^100 offers 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 lead 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?

Start by selecting a category that you are passionate about, value, and have knowledge or experience in. Brainstorm many specific problems or opportunities within that category. For instance, on a similar project we picked the “environment” category and then brainstormed solutions to the plastic bag problem as something to dig deeper into with ideas. You can view an example of this plastic bag brainstorm at: http://www.brainreactions.net/brainstorms/1815

This process example that you can see includes a question stimulated from a problem, hundreds generated ideas, collaborated ideas from multiple people, selection and voting of good ideas, and sorting most popular ideas. This simple process is valuable for creating better and more innovative ideas.

When generating ideas it is good to create with criteria in mind. This will help you to create ideas that have a better chance of success because they are grounded in the criteria that have been established. Project 10^100 has suggested five criteria:

1. Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
2. Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
3. Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
4. Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
5. Longevity: How long will the idea’s impact last?

You can select your top ideas from the brainstorm (by hitting the “good idea” button” on brainreactions.net) based on not only your passion for that idea but by how well it fits with the criteria. If it has reach, depth, attainability, efficiency, and longevity then it is a tremendous idea! The criteria will also help you to compare ideas to determine which to develop further.

You also need to do more than just develop a great concept. What is often times missing in success is being able to communicate your concept so that it is understandable, valuable and memorable. The Project 10^100 application is simple. They do though ask you to provide more about your idea or concept on key questions. Many of these questions are deserving of their own brainstorm to converge on the best ideas or answers. These questions from this Google Project are:

What one sentence best describes your idea?
Describe your idea in more depth.
What problem or issue does your idea address?
If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?
What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground?
Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it?

You can also create a short video to explain your big idea. The more visual the better to help others’ minds connect with and understand your concept. Use metaphors, evidence, stories, and examples. You can also use the brainstorming process to create a video, generating ideas for both top-level video themes and the supporting details to reinforce the theme.

So why is it so important to have a process that yields a lot of ideas instead of just one that you get by chance? Generating many ideas is a process-oriented feature of very successful innovation systems in lots of successful organizations. When they develop new products they get many, many ideas in the pipeline. From there, they qualify the ideas and whittle them down into a handful of concepts. After that, they test the concepts while developing them more and may only end up with 1 new product from 100 product ideas. This is how ideation for innovation works. More importantly, when you come up with a large number of ideas it is easier to do good analysis. You can identify some themes that a lot of the ideas shared. Some ideas will lead to new and different ideas. You will learn a lot from looking at all of the ideas from above. You will see the forest from the trees. An innovation process is necessary to develop a better big idea.

Why not carry the Google idea competition inspiration forward? With brainreactions.net you can also run your own version of the competition. Why not do the same thing at a smaller scale and provide funding for ideas to help your organization or your local community? With crowdsourcing the connections can now be made between individuals and organizations. The technology and time is ripe to open up idea submissions and competitions from normal people with great ideas.

About the Author: Darin Eich, Ph.D. helps organizations to develop and facilitate idea generating & front end of innovation systems and programs. He also speaks and trains individuals in innovation, brainstorming, creativity, and leadership. You can email Darin at darin.eich@brainreactions.com.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this