Collect and connect — that’s a bright idea

THE new year marks a new start, and for many businesses it’s an opportunity to focus on innovating and finding new ways to create value.

Many businesses, when trying to increase their innovation activities, seem to start from the same assumption: “We need more ideas … more out of the box thinking.”

So off teams go, having away days and brainstorms in the hope of discovering the radical ideas that will transform the business. This approach rarely works. The reason why, is where you start.

Innovation is not about the ideas, it is about the needs, challenges or frustrations you are solving for your customers.

Most businesses are not hampered by a lack of ideas, but a lack of understanding of customer needs.

If you want to “think’’ outside the box, you must first “get’’ outside the box.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said: “Creativity is just connecting things”. Our brains have huge capacity to store information, but we only know what we know.

To connect things, we must first collect things.

To increase your creativity and innovative ideas, here are three simple steps to collect and then connect:

1. ASK QUESTIONS

INNOVATORS are constantly questioning, asking why, why not and what if? They use questions to challenge assumptions and explore customers’ needs. Melanie Perkins, founder of graphic design company Canva, has grown a $6bn business from asking: Why is design software so hard to learn and use? What if we brought all the ingredients to create a beautiful design together in one simple-to-use platform? To think radically, you must question the normal and challenge the status quo.

2. GET OUT OF THE BOX

TO make new discoveries, businesses must explore the unnoticed needs and opportunities of their customers. By observing customers’ behaviour, we discover new ways to add value. To successfully innovate, watch and analyse behavioural details of customers, suppliers, and other companies to gain insights about new ways of doing things. James Dyson got the inspiration for the cyclonic vacuum after observing how industrial sawmills used cyclones in their dust extraction systems. He had already observed customer frustration at a loss of suction with traditional bag cleaners.

3. CONNECT THE DOTS

THE ability to connect the dots from unrelated questions, problems or ideas is central to creativity. Steve Jobs was able to innovate repeatedly because he explored new and unrelated experiences — calligraphy, the philosophy of simplicity, the elegance and detail of luxury cars, a visit to Xerox. Connecting these transformed a small business into one of the world’s most innovative organisations and changed the world forever.

Increasing creativity in business is not about increasing the volume of ideas, but increasing the questions you ask, the places you look, and the experiences you have.

Practising these activities will have radical ideas flow with abundance and ease. Andrew Jones is a director of Geelong innovation and organisational transformation company neu21.