how to Engineer innovation – out of the box? – Turn it upside down!

Getting innovation on track within companies is an interesting challenge for most of us who believe in the need and power of the same. Some key questions in the minds of people circle around a few elements like…

1. Innovation, Solution development and Creating a winning experience for our customer’s customer are all BIG Items – can be understood, articulated and may be developed by only a certain set of senior members – not truly a sweet spot for every engineer! So, how should I as an engineer contribute here? Do I really have a role to play?
2. How can I be an innovator – creating a truly non-linear value in any small/ big way? Is there a simple process I can practice – every day?
3. Can there be a simple “template” to help find solutions/ innovations that are critical for own work which in turn will impact our customer’s customer?

Everyone of us have a self fulfilling need to do our jobs better than before and help our co-workers/teams/managers/company succeed in fulfilling the promise we made to our customers. This simple route of ‘let me find and adopt ways and means to achieve better results in each and every action of mine’ is good enough trigger /contribution at all levels. When the same thinking and action is continued across levels/abstraction, we will naturally have winning solutions/accelerators – performing seamlessly!

Innovation is one subject that is researched, modeled, taught, written, questioned, and practiced across the globe for several centuries directly or indirectly. But the quest to define a method to this madness is still ON. Rightly so. If we had invented all problems and solutions that is there today and/or bound to appear tomorrow, this world would have been a different one – in shape, size or color!

If we study some very successful dreamer doers in the crowd, one clearly visible trend is the way they looked at innovation! Interestingly, most of them found a solution – a novelty first and all others spend their lives to define/find the problem(s) it will solve! This is true with our old friend Edison or the creators of Google, Face book, Twitter, Southwest Airlines and the likes… or even SEI CMM, ISO, IEEE! There always existed and exist a variety of solutions in these spaces. But these folks presented a new solution – more compelling enough to force everyone around – to be on continuous quest of new problems to solve through them!

Most of us tend to think, behave and breath problem-solving as our strength or core purpose. But, turning this upside down, we might see a different world!

Isn’t this amazing? Just pick up a product/ service or an existing solution, apply a systematic template to subtract, multiply, alter or combine some of its components / features to find a new solution! Then, look around and find problems you can solve with this new product/service?

Drew Boyd offers a simple, practical approach to innovation in this line. Check it out for a wonderful surprise!

One of the major bottlenecks in the process of innovation, apart from the critical question of “why should I innovate?”, is the common belief that everyone is an innovator! Not sure, why? But this might not always be true! Innovation is a skill to be learnt/practiced – definitely not a gift. So, it is important to know how good an innovator am I, and then learn the trick of the trade to upgrade and be successful.

Drew offers a simple, yet good self-analysis tool to establish our individual innovation quotient. Worth a try.