Find inspiration in “star” innovations

A great way to kickstart creative thinking is to google recent innovations. To use your time efficiently, go to a site that showcases many innovations with a brief summary for each. An example is “Innovation insanity” – 67 business-to-consumer innovations from trendwatching.com. The list of 67 ideas was culled from another great site, springwise.com, which can be used in the same way.

Once you land on the site, apply the tips below. They’re pulled from Star Gazer, a creative thinking exercise I developed; it uses “stars” i.e., successful people/things in various arenas, to inspire ideas.

Tip #1: Look for the insight

Pause on a single innovation: what insight has it captured? Can you apply it to your challenge? Give yourself latitude when interpreting it.

For example, an interesting insight about selling to consumers (B2C) could be applied to business customers (B2B). I loved innovation #51, “Crack of Noon Tours” – a travel tour company that doesn’t ask any of its tour clients to get up before noon. Although tour companies that cater to special consumer groups (e.g., seniors, people with disabilities) are not new, this one saw opportunity in people with a so-called bad habit — sleeping in – who were willing to pay for the privilege of a late start.

You could translate this insight to the B2B environment. Let’s say you’re a manufacturing business looking for ways to cement relationships with your customers. What kind of special privilege associated with “late arrival” or time preferences in general would represent value to them?

Innovating with “time” is not new; Toyota’s revolutionary just-in-time inventory strategy changed the face of manufacturing – and it was inspired by the way a grocery store arranged its deliveries of perishable produce.

Tip #2: Break it down

Look at a thing as a sum of its parts, and allow one single part to inspire you. For example, innovation #6, “Give Me Tap,” lets consumers in the UK (Manchester) refill their water bottles for free at various cafés in town while raising funds for charity and saving the planet from more plastic bottles. They purchase GiveMeTap’s branded aluminum bottles and find participating cafés online. For the moment, forget about the whole and just look at the pieces (this is Step 2 and 3 of Star Gazer):

• aluminum water bottles printed with logo
• charity connection helps poor communities get clean water
• participating cafés provide free tap water
• map on website shows locations of cafes
• a franchise – other cites can pick up idea using same methodology

Let’s say you were a storefront retailer looking to increase store traffic and you tripped over this innovation while surfing the net. You could use these individual pieces to trigger ideas:

• The bottle could be an excellent promotion idea – a storefront retailer like Shoppers Drug Mart could give them to loyal Optimum customers (such as myself) during a limited time period. Since people tend to lose their water bottles, repeating this promotion several times a year would have value.
• As an addition to that idea, set up a spot in the store with a water cooler and provide free refills to anyone with the bottle. It makes sense – Shoppers Drug Mart sell pills (prescription and otherwise); maybe someone wants to take a pill while in the store. Regardless, a cup of water is either an incentive for people to come into the store or a nice added value once they arrive. (When people can quench their thirst, do they buy more?)
• Or forget about the water bottle, just give away free water to any customer, in a recyclable paper cup.

Download the Star Gazer exercise – it works because it’s doesn’t ask you to adapt (or “steal”) an entire idea but rather use pieces of it for inspiration. If you’re serious about generating ideas, remember to Focus before you brainstorm and develop a Challenge Statement.

One Responseto “Find inspiration in “star” innovations”

1. barbie dressup says:

   November 13, 2011 at 7:12 pm

   Hi There! I’ve gone ahead and bookmarked http://www.creativeexpeditions.com/blog/2010/07/find-inspiration-in-star-innovations on Reddit so my friends can see it too. I just used Find inspiration in “star” innovations | Creative Expeditions as the entry in my bookmark, as I figured if it’s good enough for you to title your blog post that, then you probably would like to see it bookmarked the same way.