How To Develop Innovative Ideas ?

How To Develop Innovative Ideas ?

Albert Einstein said that the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. Innovative ideas start with the power of powerful imagination.

Everyone in this world, especially in the corporate world, thinks that they have innovative minds. They can create innovative solutions. However, this quality does not come through education or experience. No standard to quantify it. No thumb rules. It’s always a unique quality only a small percentage of people are blessed with. Also, it does not relate to hierarchy. We often see innovation in very basic levels of workers also what we see at the top level of the marketing and advertising world. Besides this many executives and managers apply something which they learnt from somewhere through offline learning or peer companies but those are not innovative or unique ideas. It may be an innovative idea created by someone sometimes. Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s practice.

Does it mean people do not have innovative minds can not apply it ever? Surely, they can but it may not come overnight with a readymade solution feed from outside. They need to start thinking in depth and differently in every situation. They may not apply it every time, but the thought process must continue.

Did you notice that your right arm is a little more muscular than your left arm (it can be the other way around for left-handers). People who go to the gym or do physical exercise have more muscles than others who do not do much exercise. Same way, if you use a part of your brain more it gets stronger day by day. That occupies more memory or makes our brain’s logical part stronger or develops quality to solve a problem innovatively. Inherent innovative-minded people are habituated to apply innovation from childhood in daily life and innovation becomes a part of their lives.

Are you expecting that I shall put a laundry list of innovative thoughts that can be applied in the workplace as readymade solutions for you? No, not at all. Even if you find a list you are copying something someone did and not an innovation. Your innovation must be something unique and designed for your company/ purpose only.

So, I am giving some examples of how a simple thing can have different dimensions and can be looked at from different angles. Few of those are Brain Exercises to develop more and more innovative thoughts which I shall write in the next article (part 2).

Here I am putting three examples I applied as a business leader.

1. Hum Saath Saath Hain (We are together)

Sales teams are always blessed to have good incentives. Sometimes it is because of good work and sometimes just because of some reason which is not really due to their high contribution as a salesperson. Some salespersons really try their best to take benefit of the incentive offers and some take it easy, neverput any additional effort.

The purpose of floating a special incentive plan is to get the best from every salesperson irrespective of their individual choice or priority. So, I created an innovative inventive plan in the annual closing month. The plan was that the entire support staff of the company (the number was equivalent to the number of salesmen) would get one month’s additional salary as an incentive if Sales achieved a certain number. This is besides the incentive of the sales team has as standard and relatively small amount compared to sales incentive but one-month additional salary is big for supporting staffs.

How funny! Sales achieve the number and others would get incentive. There were some deep thoughts behind it.
• Salespeople used to appreciate supporting team contribution in annual meetings etc but that is usually a dry appreciation. I wanted to make it juicy.
• I provoked the support team members to ask the sales team to help them to get the one-month additional salary as they always help the sales team to perform. When a peon who is popular in the office asks the sales manager, ‘sir, milega kya’, the impact is very high.
Virtually I put the entire sales team in a ‘dharma sankat’.

The good part is it worked and most pleasing that the support team got their incentive.

2. Play HOUSEY

Companies with very large product ranges find it challenging to bring the attention of frontline sales employees to do justice on all products equally. As such many products remain in very poor sale inspite good quality and market. We used to float several incentives on specific products but in that case, other products remain neglected.

One day one of our regional managers gave me a unique idea. She told me to design an incentive plan for the frontline following the housey principle. That means, put several products logically in different boxes with expected minimal sales volume for each and when a salesperson hits the ROWS, or first COLUMNS or FOUR CORNERS gets an additional incentive. A FULL HOUSE can win a bumper prize.

We applied it and got a good result. Is it a unique idea to bring focus together on several products? It was not my idea but someone with one-fifth of my experience suggested me. Innovative minds can be at any level of people and pop up anytime, the leaders need to encourage innovative thought.

3. Kill it!

I forgot it but my boss told this at a party after about a decade of the event happened. Let me tell you the story without taking the names.

It was an important meeting where four regional managers including me and two product managers were discussing an important strategy along with the business director who was boss of all of us. We were part of the leadership team also and were defining strategies.

Our company had a very good market share of a product say AA but a better alternative came as BB. BB came as an automated machine and AA was not. The major competitor had an AA-equivalent product, even better, though our company had a much better market share for various reasons. AA or AA-equivalent had a legacy and customers were satisfied with that. The team was discussing how to position AA and BB.

I was not contributing much to the discussion as my thought process was completely different and was hearing the opinions of others. My boss noticed it and angrily asked me why I was indifferent in such a serious issue. I smiled (as per our good relationship) and told, ‘Boss, I do not see any reason to discuss so much on this strategy. In my view, it should be simple.’ My boss knew me for many years and predicted something unique. He asked me, ‘what is your opinion?’
I replied, ‘we should kill AA. And sell BB only which has many unique features and we are capable of convincing customers to buy BB with some premier. We must set the trend rather than follow others.’

Some of my colleagues in that meeting started arguing. They had the counterargument that how we can say to customers that we are not selling AA. My reply was, ‘it is our product, and we can find dozens of reasons to say we do not sell AA anymore’. (Note- it was applicable as the product was unique. This can not be applied to any products where customers have several options. Also, it was most important part of selling that time was to set tender specifications as with this strategy customer was left with either AA equivalent (not our AA) or BB, no third choice and it inclined customers to BB because of our company’s high reputation, proprietary specifications).

My boss told in the party a decade later, ‘The word ‘KILL’ hits his mind. Though I continued the discussion further but at that moment it was clear to me what is the right strategy. We killed AA and that is the main reason behind our phenomenal success. We achieved almost 100% market share with BB using our expert team and applying the right strategy. We got the highest market share compared to any other counties who kept on selling both.’

These are a few real examples, which can excite you or may not, but undoubtedly innovation was blended in both cases and most importantly it helped to achieve success easier and quicker way.

Now I am giving two interesting examples of thinking out of the box but you shall find it in my next article as I try to keep each article within a reasonable word count for easy reading.

Hope you enjoyed reading this uncommon article. Start applying innovation in your work.