Innovation must start with context! If you begin the innovation process trying to come up with ideas you quickly end up processing ideas which lead nowhere. However if you begin with context the innovation process takes flows naturally. Let me explain how this works.

When you start with context you are looking at the following:

1. What do we know?
2. What do we see? – you may or may not understand what you observe.

Start by looking only within your organization, and then begin looking outside of it. Actually go outside of your office, look and observe! As you answer these questions, there are two things to pay particular attention to. First, look for problems. For example, products in the north west section of our store are not selling. Second, look for ways in which your clients use your product or space in an unintended way. These unintended uses are actually your clients solving their problems. So ask yourself what are they solving by doing this?

At this stage you should have identified one or more problem areas. Some of them may be related but try not to analyze them just yet. State your problem areas and remove any that you find negligible. While you can go forward with more then one problem area, I would suggest that you select one that if solved would have the most impact on your organization.

Next take your problem area and ask what is happening that would cause this? One cause for or previous example could be that the flow of traffic in the store allows clients to obtain all the essentials before getting to the north west section of the store. You will find multiple causes to your problem area. It can be useful to continue to ask why and find the root causes. If there is only one cause to your problem, then the problem is probably not complex and the solution would be obvious. At this point you may also need to go out and do more observations which look specifically at the problem area.

You should now have a problem area and multiple causes of this problem. The causes of the main problem area can actually be seen as sub-problems.

Here is the best part! You can now take all of your sub-problems and list them. A solution to the overall problem is found by solving these sub-problems. Now you can move on to brainstorming ideas which solve your problems.

There is no need to bang your head against the wall trying to come up with a great idea right at the beginning of the innovation process. This initial context step is simple but critical. It allows you to focus your ideas on the actual problem.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 12:55 am and is filed under Innovation Concepts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.