How To Breed An Innovative Business Idea — #21 of 31 Proven Skills [Research]
Skill #21: Align Resources to Suggest the Desired People Result
Suggesting that people behave in some desired manner usually requires a lot of effort, especially if they are uninterested or, worse, opposed to such behavior. The innovative way to tackle this challenge is to seek something that people are predisposed to do anyway and align what you require of them with that disposition
To achieve an innovative result something has to be primed (an Initiating Resource) with the intention of eliciting desired behavior or performance from a target (the Responding Resource). The Initiating Resource must then be presented to the Responding Resource if anything is to happen and this is done via a Transition Resource.
Of course, the simple act of presenting an Initiating Resource to a Responding Resource does not guarantee innovative consummation. The two broad categories of Responding Resources are ‘People’ and ‘Things’ and whereas absolute confidence can be had in the performance of Things once an innovative initiative is mounted, People, as thinking, human entities, may or may not respond as desired. Accordingly, there are three skills available for presenting an Initiating Resource to People but just one is required for presenting an Initiating Resource to Things. These four skills are part of 31 skills discovered through the study of thousands of innovative business ideas.
Skill #21: Align Resources to Suggest the Desired People Result is the most passive of the three Transition Resource skills. This is because often circumstances prevent closer proximity between an Initiating Resource and a Responding Resource. All that is possible is to ‘align’ the two and trust that Initiating Resource as modified gets noticed and then is sufficiently attractive to entice the desired response from the People group that has been targeted. The major drawback of Skill #21 is that in aligning an Initiating Resource, there is no guarantee that the target People group will become aware of what is being presented.
An illustration.
A hairdresser is initially shocked when a new competitor begins advertising haircuts for $10, well below the prevailing level in that neighborhood. After considering what to do, the barber under threat originates the slogan “We fix $10 haircuts” and advertises it prominently. Few clients are swayed by the alternate, lower price on offer and respond positively to the canny tactic with which the barber counters it.
This example demonstrates the fundamental thrust of Skill #21. Once the Initiating Resource (an advertisement) has been innovatively primed to attract the People Responding Resource (hairdressing clients), it is aligned so that there is a good chance that the intended audience becomes aware of it and then behaves as hoped. In this case, aligning a marketing initiative with what a competitor is offering is an innovative way of getting it noticed by prospective customers.
Other Examples of Aligning to Get People to Respond*
An online middleman, who supplies thousands of consumer items that it sources from multiple suppliers, encounters frequent complaints from buyers when some of those suppliers add delivery charges to the advertised prices. Negotiating with thousands of suppliers to resolve the problem is not practical. The web retailer designs algorithms that give priority in customer search to businesses that deliver free and makes the formulation of the algorithms public on its website. Most suppliers notice the policy change reflected in the algorithms — its ‘alignment’ on the website is conspicuous enough –and move to free delivery arrangements.
Although it devotes considerable attention to its recruitment processes, a hotel chain experiences a lot of employee churn, because many new hires do not meet the standards of performance required of them. The organization decides to identify and list the attributes of those employees who have adapted well and who perform their jobs competently. They develop candidate questions that are designed to reflect these ‘success factors’ and utilize them in interviews of job applicants. The alignment of preferred employee indicators with the responses of interviewees leads to appointments that are more productive and enduring.
Finally, it is worth looking at a display of the effectiveness of alignment as an innovative strategy even though it does not involve People. It does however involve the behavior of a living animal organism where certain behavior is desired. A farmer of rabbits is faced with performing the repetitive task of constantly relocating the rabbits to areas of fresh grass. To do away with this necessity, the farmer ensures that the rabbit pens are movable by the occupants who, when they exhaust the accessible grass, push against the pens, moving them over grass bordering their current location. The alignment of fresh food is a sufficient incentive to innovatively encourage behavior that accesses it.
Sometimes circumstances will dictate that influencing People can only be done indirectly, with the possibility that they might not even notice an Initiating Resource that has been designed to attract their attention and, hopefully, cause a desired response, like buying a product or service. The optimum in this situation is aligning an Initiating Resource with the target People Responding Resource. The aligning may not be noticed but without it, you are not even in the game. The more innovative the aligning strategy, the more certain it is that it will be noticed after which it can produce a satisfying result.
Takeaway
*Thousands of categorized innovative business ideas can be found at Sebir.com
