How to Breed an Innovative Business Idea — #2 of 31 Proven Skills [Research]

Skill #2: Understand What You Can Do

The art of having an innovative idea defies precise formulation but it can be meaningfully practiced. This is done by intercepting the normal, unpredictable trajectory of serendipity and by employing strategies that are inherent in innovative ideas that have already succeeded.

Although I’ve been passionate about how to have innovative ideas since my first years in business, I’ve never found it an easy subject to talk about. Consequently, it has not entered my social conversation for a long time.

In the early days, when I did raise my “project”, there was invariably polite interest but rarely enthusiasm. This puzzled me because I had both witnessed and experienced the prodigious value of a timely idea when faced with a seemingly intractable business problem.

Why did such a prospect not excite others?

I cannot certain but after much pondering, among the plausible answers to the question, I tend to favor this: the proposition that someone can come up with an innovative idea whenever they like is inherently dubious.

It is like saying that you have cracked the secret of how the human brain works.

No wonder people were just tepidly gracious.

Nevertheless, I have never wavered in my fundamental belief. Developing an ability to innovate is an invaluable skill that can be learned … although not on the level of precisely controlling one’s brain. Between the extremes of such neural precision and complete imaginative helplessness, you can do a lot. I often fall back upon the observation of that all-round clever person, Albert Einstein, who said:

“Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.”

I came to recognize such a logical structure and there are two personal strategies embedded in it:

> putting yourself in the right place at the right time;

> developing innovative skills.

While many may believe that the intentional generation of innovative ideas is not practically possible, they do not usually deny that we are all capable of having innovative ideas. Our minds obviously do engage in imaginative reasoning. It is more that most of us regard the emergence of innovative ideas as being a matter of chance, of luck. Often called serendipity.

And, when serendipity happens, it is usually through the acknowledged phenomenon of “mental association.”

History contains many famous, inventive solutions that have come about through mental association. This happened when the mind of an innovator connected previously unrelated phenomena to create a marvelous new product or service.

Typist, Bette Nesmith, who was also an amateur artist, observed that artists simply painted over their mistakes. She took what artists do to compensate for their errors and associated it to the problem of typing mistakes. This led her to invent a liquid that typists use to paint over their errors. The iconic Liquid Paper was born.

During a journey, he was taking across the USA, and while wrestling with the problem of electrical energy not traveling over distance, Samuel Morse noted the addition of fresh horses at stagecoach stops. He associated from the capability of fresh horses to boost physical energy to the idea of adding together relay stations that would boost electrical energy. With the distance transmission problem overcome, Morse Code soon became a reality.

Therefore, ideas birthed through mental association are real enough but their reliance on serendipity, on a happy accident if you like, is a major failing.

If having ideas this way is not controllable, it is of no practical value.

This is where putting yourself in the right place at the right time comes in. It involves taking intentional steps to encounter a type of experience that is relevant to a problem you are facing. In effect, placing yourself in the path of serendipity. Doing this simply means that you increase the chances that you will be able to mentally associate to a solution that works for you.

It is about seeking and locating solutions that have solved problems similar to yours. (Thousands of categorized business ideas can be found at Sebir.com.)

The second personal strategy is about developing proficiency in generating problem-solving ideas without a triggering experience. This is done through developing innovative skills. In deconstructing thousands of successful business ideas and then reconstituting them, I have identified repeating patterns that can be translated into around 31 distinct innovative skills that can be learned.

Before I finish, I should acknowledge at least one other plausible reason for the less than enthusiastic response I received from many whom I spoke to about my work. I am thinking about an observation attributed to Larry Ellison, co-founder of the computer technology corporation, Oracle: “When you innovate you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you you’re nuts”.

Even if they don’t say it.

Takeaway