Innovate - Chapter 3

Chapter 3 - How to generate new ideas: 5 steps that lead to innovation

Generating ideas is vital for businesses to survive and thrive. As change accelerates in markets and technology, entrepreneurs need to continually innovate to compete, grow and remain relevant for their customers.

1. Foster a culture of innovation

This means a culture promoting employee participation and trust, as well as trying new things, adapting and learning. “If you have a closed-door organization, it’s hard to make idea flow happen,” Paul Redmond says.

Your team needs to see that your leadership values, encourages and rewards ideas. It can’t just be lip service. Employees can easily see if their input is really wanted—or if all the talk about innovation is just talk.

2. Identify challenges and collect ideas

Now you’re ready to start gathering ideas. It’s common to begin with a challenge—for example, a new technology, unanswered customer need, production bottleneck, product issue or pricing—then find ideas to solve it.

It’s important to come up with various ways of generating ideas inside and outside your organization.

3. Validate

Now it’s time to explore your best ideas further to research if they’re worth pursuing and even implementing. For example, if the idea is a new digital service, you can discover who the target customers are, validate the value proposition with them on social media or directly, examine the market potential and talk to your team about design and production possibilities.

4. Implement and scale

Once you’re comfortable that an idea has potential, it’s time to proceed to implementation. You can start small—for example, with a pilot or prototype—seek feedback as you work out any kinks, and scale.

Constantly review the implementation to make sure it remains aligned with customer needs, pivot when necessary, and listen to employees and stakeholders to obtain feedback and adapt as needed.

5. Measure your efforts

Think of a few key performance indicators you can track, such as

• revenue generated or costs saved from new ideas