High-impact innovation? Forget brainstorming!

Luca Maestri, Apple’s Chief Financial Officer, who was recently honored with the 2016 Luiss Alumnus Award, was asked by a student what he had learned from working at a company like Apple. He replied:

«The culture of detail. People imagine these major companies as hotbeds of creativity – and I’m also thinking of Amazon, Google, Facebook – but they are execution machines; they have incredibly tight processes. It’s a bit like serving in the military.»

This first-hand account comes as no surprise to those with a deep understanding of innovation processes. At the same time, it highlights how entrepreneurs and managers are often anchored to a romanticized view of innovation – as if it were purely the result of flash-of-genius moments and spontaneous breakthroughs – that simply doesn’t match reality.

The inspiration for the Apple Store concept didn’t come from a group of people sitting around a table tossing out random ideas, nor from a handful of creatives locked away in a room. Apple created an innovative retail experience by studying a company renowned for its customer experience – the Four Seasons hotel chain. Not a multitude of superficial ideas, but a vision developed in depth.

Therefore, the inability of many companies to generate truly effective innovation does not stem from a lack of creativity or genius among their people, but rather from the lack of an innovation system. When we talk about an innovation system, we mean:

• a set of codified, clear, and repeatable steps that, when executed correctly, consistently lead to high-impact innovations

• an environment and a culture (a “social system”) that fosters innovation (for more details, see: : the 5 false myths of innovation)

From this perspective, the Italian business landscape is quite bleak. Instead of a structured innovation system, the notorious “brainstorming” is often cited as the primary method for innovating – which couldn’t be further from the high-impact innovation processes used by world-class companies!

1. Don’t start with a product, start with a problem

Apple had a clear vision of the goal they wanted their customers to achieve—which reflected what they, as a company, wanted to deliver: enriching the customer’s life through the in-store experience. They defined the service based entirely on this objective.
Moving into the more familiar world of tangible goods, James Dyson – founder of the company that bears his name – didn’t start out with the goal of simply making a vacuum cleaner. Instead, he was frustrated by the fact that standard vacuum cleaners quickly lost their suction power because dust clogged the bag. Searching for a solution to achieve his specific goal (continuous suction with no loss of power) drove him to create the cyclonic vacuum cleaner. Along the way, it also allowed him to amass a personal fortune of over 3 billion dollars.

Customers don’t buy products, and they don’t want them. They buy solutions to achieve their goals.
Identify a goal that matters to your customers and help them reach it. This ensures you are working on something that delivers genuine value to them.

2. Explore alternative paths in a structured way

Once you have identified your customers’ goal, explore different paths to find potential solutions that help them achieve that goal better than any other option currently available to them. For instance, you can analyze alternative industries.
In Apple’s case, the alternative industry they analyzed was hospitality, specifically, the Four Seasons hotel chain. Had they started from the product itself (the retail store), it would have been difficult to view the Four Seasons as a source of inspiration. However, because they had clearly defined what they wanted to offer the customer (the goal)—which was to enrich their lives, it became easy to identify hotel chains as another industry dedicated to enriching the customer experience.
In Dyson’s case, the idea for cyclonic technology came from observing a sawmill. Sawmills face the constant challenge of separating and continuously vacuuming away wood shavings from their operations, and they used cyclonic technology to do just that.

Another approach involves analyzing how different customers, such as those from different market segments, solve a particular problem. For example, some budget-conscious customers achieve the goal of staying fit by purchasing books and videos to work out at home. Others, meanwhile, are willing to pay for gym memberships. Can you create something that satisfies the frustrated customers from both groups?

Starting from the goal, rather than the product opens diverse avenues of exploration. These can provide unconventional insights to work with, helping you generate high-impact innovations that customers will love.

3. Create your differentiating vision

Successful innovations deliver a functional, emotional, or status-related outcome for the customer that is vastly superior to that of competing products or services.
Apple Stores offer an experience that is demonstrably superior and completely different from any other retail outlet.
What do you want customers to offer to help them achieve the goal you have identified? How does your solution stand out from the market? Why should customers choose it over others? These are all questions you must answer when creating your differentiating vision.

4. Experience and test your vision

Experiment with your vision. What are the underlying hypotheses of your vision? What are the potential causes of failure? Once you have identified these factors, you must experiment with your customers to see if your core assumptions hold true. If they do, you can move forward with the actual development of the solution. If they don’t, you need to rethink your vision.

When Stewart Butterfield realized that the video game he was developing – Glitch – was not gaining market traction, he decided to pivot his vision. He shifted his focus from a gaming system to a communication system. That is how Slack was born, which went on to become the fastest-growing business communication tool.

Knowing how to experiment effectively with customers is one of the most critical skills in today’s competitive landscape. And it can be done scientifically! If you cannot do this on your own, look for professionals who can guide you before you exhaust all your resources pursuing a path that will never bear the hoped-for fruit.

These steps are not a magic wand that will instantly transform every company into the absolute best in its industry. However, learning to work according to these guidelines can concretely help entrepreneurs and managers become more innovative and efficient in their creative processes, saving time and resources that would otherwise be wasted in endless, fruitless brainstorming sessions!