5 Things to know before you start innovating

The disruption is real. Innovation is our way to stop being a victim to disruption and take the opportunities hiding in the chaos. Money doesn’t just evaporate during a recession, it merely changes hands, so this crazy time we’re living in is rich with opportunities. Before you jump into innovation and make the common mistakes, here are 5 things you need to know before you begin. 

Listen to this article via the NEW Failure Friendly Podcast on Apple Podcast or Soundcloud. 

1. The Difference Between Innovation and Creativity 

Before I tell you my secret to innovation, I need you to understand the difference between creativity and innovation. Creativity is coming up with brand new original ideas. Creativity is looking at problems in brand new original ways. Creativity is taking existing ideas that don’t normally belong together and pairing them in brand new original ways.

Innovation on the other hand uses creativity, but the thing that takes it from being creative to be innovative, is that it has to meet this one extra criteria. And that is, it needs to create VALUE. Real, big, impactful value to the end user. So if you’re a business, to your customer. It has to be a solution that they value, that they want to pay money for, that they want to invest their time and energy into, that they want to use. If it’s not used, it doesn’t innovate. 

People have been really creative, they’ve seen the problem of wearing glasses in the rain, not being able to see because of the fog and droplets of water on the glass. So they’ve come up with this creative solution where they’ve taken the existing idea of windscreen wipers and paired it with reading glasses. But you don’t see people walking around with this creative solution because people don’t value that solution. People don’t want windscreen wipers going off in their eyes, making their glasses heavy, noisy and weird looking.

People have been really creative and they’ve put little umbrellas on expensive designer shoes to protect them from the rain. But you don’t see people walking around with little umbrellas on their shoes because the end user, the person who buys expensive designer shoes, buys them because they want to show them off and appreciate the design, they don’t want to cover them or interfere with the design by adding ugly little umbrellas. And really, the bigger problem when walking in the rain is the puddles, not the actual raindrops that fall from the sky.

So here are two really fun creative solutions that completely lost sight of the end user and what the end user values - so they didn’t innovate.

2. The Greatest Stumbling Block to Innovation

One of the traps or stumbling blocks to innovation is that we can get obsessed with and fall in love with the first idea, or the solution we personally want. Our idea baby. Because we’re focused on making OUR idea, we lose sight of the problem we’re trying to solve and the person we’re trying to solve the problem for. We miss the better solution because we’re stuck on our solution. We can get caught up in the excitement of using a brand new technology like augmented reality because it’s new and fun. Just because it’s new and fun doesn’t mean it’s going to be an innovative solution, it doesn’t mean the end user is going to want to use it, it doesn’t mean they are going to pay for it, or that it will be successful.

3. How ‘User Centred Design’ Methodology Works and Why it’s Important

In innovation theory there’s a system called ‘User Centred Design’ that keeps us on track so we don’t get too taken by our first shiny idea and forget about why we’re really doing it. Here’s a quick overview of User Centred Design:

Before we get stuck on our favourite solution or even the problem we’re trying to solve, the first step is Empathy. Gaining empathy with the end user, learning everything we can about them. Not just the problem we think they have but the core root of the problem, their lifestyle, the things they love and hate, the things they already have at their disposal. This helps us move into the second step to Define the problem. We can think we know the problem and have the solution figured out but without doing that deep empathy work we can’t be sure.

Once we have defined the problem using that empathy data, the next step is Ideate, by coming up with as many ideas as possible. Some great solutions are just stepping stones to better ideas. The more ideas and bits of information we have, the more possibility we have to let ideas come together and create super ideas. Ideate is about not judging your ideas too early because even though something doesn’t seem possible it can be the seed that makes us think of a new way of doing things.

The next two steps are the most important, Prototyping and Testing. Once we find a strong solution we quickly and rapidly come up with cheap prototypes that we can test. In the prototyping step we create a minimum viable product, that’s not supposed to be perfect, it’s purely used to Test the idea. Testing is not about checking it looks nice, or even testing the functionality, testing is done by putting the prototype in the hands of the end user and seeing what happens when they use it. It’s about getting their feedback early on!

We preface the test by explaining it is not the finished product, it’s just a prototype for them to trial and let us know if we’re on the right track. From there we may need to go back to define the problem because we realise we had it wrong, we may need to go back to some of our other ideas or come up with new ideas based on their feedback. Then again, Prototype and Test over and over until we get the feedback from the consumer ‘I need this in my life, when and where can I get this!’ Only then do we start investing heavily and perfecting the solution. One of the rules for innovation is to always ‘test before you invest’.

4. How Short Term Memory Affects Your Ability to Innovate

I’m not telling you about the rules of User Centred Design to freak you out or let you think there is a right way and a wrong way to do innovation. I don’t want you to put it in the too hard basket and leave it up to the experts. I’m telling you this because I need you to understand how to use your brain most efficiently.

Our brains are great places to have ideas but they are not great places to keep ideas.

The magic of our our brains is that they can zoom out and see multiple ideas and insights, they can make connections between ideas and do that creative work. The brain can take a memory and a new piece of information that has just been learnt and join them together to create a new idea.

That’s what we need our brains to do when we are innovating, when we’re Ideating and coming up with as many ideas as possible. But our brains can’t do that if they’re trying to sit still and remember all the ideas we’ve just come up with.

The first idea is always the worst, it’s always the most obvious and the least creative. It takes at least 10 bad ideas to come up with one good idea, this is called the ‘ideas funnel’. But the short term memory of our brains can only remember around 3-5 things at any one time. After that our brains struggle and strain to hold on to more ideas, we begin to feel foggy, overwhelmed and we begin to forget things.

If all your brain muscles are used to juggle and hold ideas together at once it’s unable to do its zooming out, connective and creative work. It’s unable to keep focus on the end user, providing value for them, and the problem you’re trying to solve - because once it’s got your top 3 solutions in focus, there is no more space or brain power to focus on anything else.

5. The Secret Weapon to Free Up your Brain Muscles and be More Innovative

Allow me to introduce you to my secret weapon, the Failure Friendly Innovation Starter Kit. I’ve made a few kits that you can buy, but I encourage you to use this idea and create your own. Every kit is full of colourful playful tools to use your brain the way it was intended. Tools that will free up your brain so it doesn’t have to remember every idea, tools that will give it room to move and zoom out to see creative connections. Every starter kit will be different, but every kit will have these three things:

• Post-it-notes

• White board markers

• Crayons

There will be heaps of other fun stuff in there as well but these three things are the most powerful for freeing your mind. At every step, whether you’re coming up with everything you know about the end user, everything you know about the potential problem, or every potential solution - use a post-it-note to title every idea individually. 

Once you’ve done your brain dump onto individual post-it-notes, place them out on a table or ideally on a blank wall. The starter kits will include multiple coloured post-its so you can colour code your ideas, which will help your brain see categories. 

Now that you can see all of those thoughts that your poor brain would have tried to hold space for, you can zoom out and start organising your ideas. You will start to see idea gaps, ideas that are similar, that go together, ideas that could become super ideas.

The process of creating themes and categories is intuitive, follow your gut. The great thing about post-it-notes is that you can move them around as many times as you want until you’re happy.

The next valuable tool in the innovation starter kit is a whiteboard maker. I don’t expect everyone to have a whiteboard, but everyone has a window or a mirror. (I love to use red lipstick on a mirror). Creative and innovative work needs space, more space then you’re going to get on a word document or blank page. You can take your post-it-notes to the mirror or window or take the themes that have emerged from your post-it-notes to the new space of your makeshift white board. Here using the maker, you can create flow charts of how the ideas fit together, user journey maps, diagrams or drawings. Just give your ideas room to play and see what happens. There is no right or wrong way to do this.

The last tool is a crayon or kids pencil or marker. This is because perfectionism is the enemy of creativity. Crayons force us to be messy and make mistakes, and mistakes (or ‘discoveries’ as we call them at Failure Friendly) are a crucial part of creativity.

I could talk about the science of innovation and creativity and why anxiety is an important part of the process but all I want you to understand is that:

For our brain to do its most creative work we need to free it up. We need to get ideas out of our heads in a visual and messy way, that can be moved around, so we don’t have to hold onto those ideas and how they fit together. By having it in front of us visually, gives us the freedom to see new connections. It’s the freedom to move, to play, to be colourful and childlike - that is the secret key to innovation.

Wishing you the best of luck.

Buzzy x

To order your own Failure Friendly Innovation Starter Kit email buzzy@failurefriendly.com