I wanted pumpkin pancakes this weekend. However, we have family members who are vegan and gluten-free. I needed a recipe everyone could eat. I was determined and started pulling ideas from a few different sources and went to work. I had a problem to solve in a way I had not solved for before. It required me to get creative and experiment with different amounts of ingredients until I was happy with my results. Essentially, I walked through the innovation process. After making two batches, I am pleased to report we loved the pancakes.
You also likely have a problem to solve at work or home but have not dedicated time to find a solution. We tend to do one of three things with problems: ignore it, fix symptoms, not the root cause, or make another choice, so we do not have to fix the issue. This is where dedicated innovation time can help. It provides the opportunity to step back and examine problems, reimagine products, processes, people, and even your company’s future.
If you are a product-based business, a great place to start is with a pain point your customer is facing. Can you innovate with a current product or develop a new product to solve their biggest problem? In other words, where can you fill the gap in your market and create a solution for your customers? In the software world, this could be dedicating a few days of a sprint or development cycle to experiment with a new technology that can be used to enable new functionality and better customer experience. In manufacturing, this could be reconfiguring a line in the plant to determine if you can gain efficiencies. For leaders, this could be stepping back and consciously taking the members of your team out of the boxes they are placed in and reimagine how they can use their strengths best to grow themselves and your organization.
Often, people do not know where to begin to start innovating. My suggestion is to pick a day a month or half a day every week to dedicate to innovation time and start with one idea. Depending on the problem being solved, you may need more or less time. The three basics steps to walk through are ideate, prototype, and validate. Ideation is merely coming up with ideas to work on, prototyping is picking one of the ideas and creating a potential solution, and validating is seeing how the prototype works.
Top companies make innovation part of their culture and use it to solve problems and stay competitive. Set expectations upfront that not everything will be a winning idea, and it is ok to fail. It is all about the process, which will lead to results, which will lead to a better future for you and your business.