Circle of Innovation

Hello Everyone, this is my first post on this blog site on entrepreneurship and innovation. Tomorrow we have a second lecture of Open and User Innovation and I am really looking forward to it. I have read an assigned article to us and I have analyzed it with my own understanding and concepts which I have developed so far. I think my first post should be about sharing my analysis which may help others see this article and understand it with a different perspective. Lets see what I have understood and got from the assigned article on Finding your Innovation Sweet Spot.

Product developers are always getting this advice from the Marketers that customers are always right or customers get 100% of the votes. Entrepreneurs should develop something which should meet the needs and wants of customers. They should develop products by placing themselves and perceiving themselves as their current and potential customers. But what really a person needs or wants cannot be describe or explained clearly. If it is easily explainable and identifiable, it means there is something already present in the market which can fulfil that need. This is clearly not an innovation which is desired for entrepreneurship. So if the customers can’t explain clearly what they need, how entrepreneurs can develop something according to their needs and problems. If a company tries to extend the features of its existing product little bit, it cannot be able to lure the customers to take out the money from their pockets to buy that new product easily.

One way to deal with this problem of making customers break their established ways of spending money and buy your new product no matter how much it costs, is to think out of the box. This means think for the new product service without bounding yourself to one domain. But this also rises the issue of how can we reach a best solution or develop a service or product if there are infinite different domains of thinking our service into. It can lead to coming up with an idea which can totally contradict the current position of the company in the market making it difficult for the company to pursue that product for a long time. For example, Scott Company which made sanitary paper tissues and towels went into making paper dresses for the party as being a novel and new idea for marketing. This idea helped the company with big sales and profits but the company was overwhelmed with big promotion and sales eventually and ended this product saying that it was a paper tissue company, not a dress manufacturer. Scott only used this idea of disposable paper dresses to advertise its new paper products but it lead to creation of an industry of paper dresses which was not the motivation of the company behind this innovative product.

So the simple solution is that think freely far enough from existing products but keep yourself inside the imaginary circle of company’s position and capabilities in market. This is what we call finding your sweet spot of innovation. The above circle diagram shows how one can move within a circle of company’s position and capabilities using five patterns of systematic inventive thinking to develop something innovative.

Hope the above explanation helps the readers to think about innovation by binding your thinking power within a circle of company’s limitations with choosing an existing product as starting point or center of circle and moving away from the product by applying one or more out of five patterns for thinking in a systematic manner until reach your final destination of innovative product,

Regards

Amna