Innovation Tools: The Best Ones

At the start of the twenty-first century, the innovation buzz has become deafening. It commands the attention of everything – from the popular media to scientific journals. Innovation is claimed to be the driver of economies and the competitive edge of companies. With innovation being the core of many new management styles, one question still remains for the enthusiastic manager; what are the concrete tools for my employees to build our revolutionary innovations?

One of the core challenges facing companies is not a lack of ideas, but an abundance of them. For example, in 2009, the entrepreneur and author Seth Godin got the nine of his alternate MBA students to come up with 111 ideas each to create 999 business ideas. The challenge then for corporations and individuals is to be able to find out quickly, which ideas work and which don’t. To do so requires ways to cheaply test ideas in a low-risk way that lets employees and entrepreneurs test their innovations.

So what can be done?

The best you can do is to minimize your risk for a given innovation and innovation is an extremely risky business. Around 4% of innovation initiatives achieve their internally defined success criteria. Even worse, only 12% of research and development projects even return their capital cost. In fact according to the innovation expert Darrell Mann, 98% of all innovation attempts end in failure!

The Best Tools To Solve The Most Difficult Problems

As with many things, we are lucky we live in the twenty first century. Apart from being blessed with the innovation buzzword, we are also blessed with numerous tools to address risks and reduce them to manageable levels. To nail the execution. These tools are being used by the most successful startups around the world, the best management teams running Fortune 500 companies as well as by people geared for success. It is these tools which are analyzed and presented in my forthcoming book “Innovation Tools”.

The tools to achieve these goals nowadays are focused around a few enabling principles. They are mostly about connecting the right people to the right problems. And doing this in the simplest and most frictionless way possible. We are seeing this with Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, Open Innovation (both ingoing and outgoing), Open Access, Open Source, and many more.

These are some of the tools I tell people to use to solve their problems. But as many know, the devil is in the details. Launching a successful Crowdfunding campaign can sometimes be more expensive than simply using the campaign costs to fund your innovation. Open Innovation has led to many high-profile failures by companies from Chevrolet to BP receiving the dreaded “Crowdslap”.

These tools may solve many problems, but not all. There exists other problems which involve a solution focused on a different business model which cannot be solved so easily by the crowd.

For example, innovative business models which break down once expensive services and products and deliver the services and products in a more affordable form. It is these business model “tools” such as Hackerspaces, X-as-a-Service offerings, Uber style companies and many more, which are solving the concrete problem of simply having access to expensive capital to test ideas. These businesses are leveling the playing field for access to enabling technologies. Small startups can now launch products to cater for the entire world on a shoestring budget.

Again the successful implementation of these tools has become challenging for many. However, this need not be the case. What has made their usage so much easier, is that these tools are tried and tested. You can learn from the best. How a mastermind crowdfunded their idea. How someone prototyped their Minimum Viable Product at a hackerspace. Like searching on Google how to unblock your drain, it is now possible to easily find others’ success stories and emulate their best practices.

The Challenging Journey Forward

For many companies the low lying fruit has already been picked. This means that innovations are becoming more complex. Finding the right combination of the aforementioned tools has also become a challenge. But when done successfully it can see an idea skyrocket on the back of very little. A few cheap tools and some help from the crowd. Done correctly, this is a major innovation in its own right.

This is a topic which fundamentally interests me and which I see as being a major stumbling block for anyone who wishes to implement Lean or Bootleg strategies to start a company or launch a major new innovation initiative within a mature firm. We all know the principles but what are the tools? This incessant question has bothered me so much that I decided to write down the best tools available to companies and individuals and put them together in a book called “Innovation Tools” which will be forthcoming soon (click here).

Over the next two months, I will be briefly presenting the topics appearing in the book in the coming blogs but more importantly, when I launch the book I will be giving each reader a treasure trove of information.

Through this, I hope to document, for the first time, each step in the publishing, marketing and selling of a book.  That, in of itself, will be book publishing innovation.

As part of the book launch, I will be opening up the entire marketing process to reveal what works and what doesn’t. You will be able to track each of the different marketing strategies and their effect. You will see revenues generated from each marketing strategy, the effect of combining multiple marketing channels and much more.

So stay tuned for some exciting stuff!