Over the last seven years, I have been doing my bit in
helping my clients innovate more effectively. Their business domains varied
from apparel design to aircraft design and from software product development to
educational services in social sector. During this journey I ended up using a
number of tools – perhaps over fifty. However, I have developed special friendship
with some of the tools – primarily due to their usefulness under varied
contexts. Here I would like to present 3 such tools which I find very useful in
almost any context.
Weighing scale: I
am a big fan of weighing
scale as a metaphor. It is simple, easily accessible and provides
emotion-proof feedback. You weigh the same no matter how angry you are. In
contrast, a report based on an annual survey is typically neither simple, nor
that easy to re-create and incorporates emotional biases. I suggest innovation
dashboards and also get my clients into a dialogue on 5-levels
of innovation maturity which are more like weighing scales. Not everybody
in the room may agree on whether they are at level 2 or 3 on innovation
maturity. However, it creates a useful discussion on what they can do next. For
example, if the key challenge is that the average response time for an idea is
more than a month, a discussion happens around what can be done to reduce it.

Bright spots are useful because they can tell us a lot
about how things work in the same cultural context. They inspire and also give
direction. Bright spots are not easy to find because they typically don’t bubble
up through status reports. Whether it is interesting prototypes or big bets
related to specific technology trends (like cloud or humanoids), chances are
high somebody in some corner is working on it or at least thinking about it. Can
we zoom in there and find more about it? Perhaps the situation is scalable.

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