Innovate!

Innovation is a bloodbath.

Thousands of ideas are born in brainstorming sessions every day only to get killed in the next step. The innovation process as practised by most companies wastes a lot of ressources and produces mediocre results. The basic idea is: let‘s throw up as many concepts as possible and then filter out the bad, the too expensive and the impossible ones. The filtering process is costly because it usually means a lot of research; it‘s long-winding because at every decision point there sits a committee. And the results rarely „make a dent in the universe“, as Steve Jobs summed up the benchmark for Apple products.

We believe there is a better way.

New and groundbreaking ideas are often found at the intersection of three trajectories:

1. 1.What people need: although this is not always what people say they want, this trajectory is usually covered in innovation processes today – with room for improvement.
   

2. 2.What competitors are missing: a lot of successful innovations – like the iPod – just avoid the failures that competitors made before them. Current innovation approaches tend to avoid competititors‘ territories altogether or take their lack of success as a sign of low potential.
   

3. 3.What technology makes possible: today we bring the engineers much too late into the process because we believe that marketing should be driving innovation. However, advances in technology are the driving force behind many or most true innovations – and not just in consumer electronics but in everything from convenience food and baby diapers to financial services and real estate.
   

How to find that space? The key is to bring to the table the owners of all three kinds of knowledge in the ideation: this involves marketing, research and development, and consumers. The latter not of the representative, but of the articulate type.

At Lokomotive, we call our approach to ideation the X-Group. Try it out!