engineering the TMRW app. We wanted it to have simplicity and ease of use, but without any first-level menus. At first, this seemed crazy, but I knew that conflicting constraints (easy navigation but with no menus) have led to breakthroughs in other industries, so we continued down that line of thinking. And while we couldn’t remove all first-level menus in the finished app, this way of approaching the issue did result in an interface that’s distinctly different in its ease of use and navigation. Innovation is as much about process as it is about ideas and challenging the norm, and diversity of experience and backgrounds are the sources that fuel innovation. It’s also important to realise that innovation is not a one-time event, but a continuous process of learning and refinement. Only then can you come up with an innovation that’s truly transformative.
commercial viability, it will still need to be feasible. So, it comes down to whether a large enough group of people feel that this idea, once launched, creates sufficient value that makes it worthwhile to pay for it. How to spark innovation In business, innovation can only take place once you have an organisational culture where members feel safe to challenge ideas and decisions. Sufficient challenge is absolutely crucial for creating innovation. Without it, the best thinking doesn’t happen and the best thoughts don’t float to the top. Creating such a culture is harder than it sounds, however, because staff will always feel it’s risky to challenge their boss. Hierarchies are a major obstacle to the free exchange of opinions. It’s therefore vital that you allow every member of staff the chance to share their thoughts. When working at TMRW, the digital bank I set up in 2017, I always encouraged everyone to ask “why?” And I made it a rule that if the most junior person in the room asked “why?”, it was up to the most senior person in the room to answer the question. This simple rule broke down the hierarchy barrier, and the healthy debates that ensued allowed us to flesh out the issues at hand and come up with some more rigorous ideas.
Each method has its approach and its constraints. Starting with problems facilitates an understanding of the customer in their own environment and what might help to solve the problems they encounter in their life or work. But it potentially introduces constraints and bias as a result of understanding the issues in detail. Starting with ideas, on the other hand, can free you from these constraints, but you may not be clear whether it really solves the critical problems which your customers have. While there are differences between the two approaches, they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive and you can combine the two. You could start by understanding the problem, then use the solution approach to derive a better solution to the original problem. Ideas vs innovation Now you’ve come up with your brilliant idea, it’s time to define the differences between an idea and an innovation. An idea is a new suggestion or plan for doing something. And an innovation is a novel idea or proposition that’s desirable (meaning customers want to pay for it), viable (it’s profitable and sustainable as a business) and feasible (can be executed). ‘Novel’ indicates that an innovation must be new – there must be a new twist in the way something is done (no matter how small) for it to qualify as an innovation. The world has plenty of ideas, but few innovations. This is because unlike ideas, innovations must meet the desirable, viable and feasible criteria. ‘Desirable’ establishes that it’s only an innovation if customers want to pay for it. This is in turn linked to viability, because if no one pays for it, then eventually the idea cannot become an innovation that can sustain itself. And in order to hit the third criteria of feasibility, the innovation must have a high innovation. That’s because lots of ideas may not have any desirable application for which it’s commercially possible to charge a price for their use. And, in any case, even if the idea meets the criteria for desirability and likelihood of being brought to life. It takes many ideas to get just one
‘In business, innovation can only take place once you have an organisational culture where members feel safe to challenge ideas and decisions’
Another technique for sparking innovation is adding constraints. Education specialist Brandon Rodriguez declared that “constraints aren’t the boundaries of creativity, but the foundations of it”– which for me says it all. You can thus ramp up the innovation process even more by setting conflicting constraints. Of course, if you do set
constraints, it may feel as if innovation is even harder to achieve – especially if you’re trying to drive an experience that’s seamless, frictionless and intuitive. A personal example of this is when we were
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