Ideas for innovation may come from various sources, including:
- Internal employees as well as customers
- Within the industry as well as other industries
- Customers of the organization as well as non-customers
All these ideas can be broadly categorized into the following three buckets.
A. Reactive
- Pain areas or issues or problems in the current system
- Things that are not working well, including those with poor quality and poor user rating
- Things that have significant limitations
B. Proactive
- Proactive ideas from users, employees, vendors, etc.
- Ideas to move to subsequent maturity areas
- Expanding boundaries for better customer experience and value
- New requirements, the customer wants and needs, new product ideas, etc.
C. Explorative
- Disruptive technologies, innovation opportunities, ideas from academia, etc.
- Ideas from outside the industry
- New technologies, processes, products, etc.
- Disrupting current systems; and replacing them with newer ones
Each of these channels has a specific lifecycle process for ‘idea to implementation’. We should treat them differently as each has a different kind of validation, value, and timeline.
Focus on all three channels to build a healthy portfolio of ideas that helps business success in the short-term as well as in the long-term.
CforXL 