Innovation: Seeing Differently
Blog entry about innovation |
Written by Christopher Golda on February 14th, 2008
Successful innovators have ways of seeing the world that throw new opportunities into sharp relief. They have developed, usually by accident, a set of perceptual “lenses†that allow them to pierce the fog of “what is†in order to see the promise of “what could be.†How? By paying close attention to four things that usually go unnoticed:
- Unchallenged orthodoxies—the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities.
- Underleveraged competencies—the “invisible†assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms.
- Underappreciated trends—the nascent discontinuities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones.
- Unarticulated needs—the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address.