One size doesn’t fit all

At times innovation feels like that famous scene in the Monty Python film, ‘Life of Brian’, where the crowd is told, “you are all different” and they reply in unison “yes we’re all different”. It’s a wonderfully ironic example of saying one thing and doing another.

We may be all working for different companies, with different innovation needs and challenges, yet too often everyone is approaching innovation in the same way.

Currently, too many companies are doing…

the same things

in similar ways,

with the same consumers,

asking the same questions,

reading the same reports,

going to the same conferences

and getting to the same ideas,

at about the same time!

Innovation is a growth game… and growth comes in numerous different forms so the first question needs to be what type of growth are you looking for?

Steal Share (same brand and core category)

This is all about identifying your competitors’ weaknesses and exploiting them.

We are all very familiar with this game!

It’s Byron Sharpe’s home turf… It’s about how you innovate to what you and others are already doing, but do it better…

Like the old but rightly famous introduction of round then pyramid-shaped teabags

Occupy (category/ brand extension)

This is all about understanding where your brand has a right to extend into adjacent categories and finding something new to bring to that category or market…

Like the new Jack Daniels’ Tennessee Cider

Colonise (emerging occasions and needs)

The aim of Colonise is to build an understanding of emerging occasions, needs and categories… and to act fast to bring new ideas to market that will unlock new opportunities…

Like Amazon Alexa

Explore (future longer-term)

This is about discovering new market opportunities, new business models or new routes to market.

This is the space for more radical innovation, and needs a different, more disruptive and deviant approach possibly ignoring the consumer at least to start with…

Like a Spotify or Netflix

Too often when asked what type of innovation they want too many companies say a bit of everything and they and/or the consultancies they use default to a compromised one size fits all type of approach – with explanatory consumer research, ideation and co-creation or more truthfully co-development sessions.

It’s time we thought more about the relationship between the type of innovation you’re working on and the methodology you want to use.

In Steal, it’s often all about tweaks to the product; you may not need a massive team, you may just need a tight team of functional experts.

In Occupy, consumers can be more useful as they can understand the shift into nearby categories, so co-creation might be appropriate for identifying and building ideas.

In Colonise, the challenge is trickier, you’re going to need more time to crack it. A hackathon might be a useful component, but as part of a longer process.

In Explore, you really need to challenge conventions and recognise that the consumer may be no help – they don’t know what they want and probably won’t until you show it to them, so skunk teams, ‘future teams’, interviews with the crazies, the 1%, the mavens and start-ups feel more appropriate. You might even want to start watching sci-fi movies after all it’s where the idea for the mobile phone came from.

Different types innovation need different approaches and different people or at least using different mind sets and methodologies – so if you want them all I would suggest running multiple work streams or different teams with different objectives and adopting different methodologies – sometimes less doesn’t lead to more.

By Giles Lury, director, The Value Engineers