The Innovation space is generally considered to be the sort of place where the “boffins” (I suppose I should call them “Geeks” nowadays) sit with their technical toys and dream up ways of using their new toy to inflict pain on the masses. My team are trying to capture and process new ideas as part of their role in driving Innovation but it struck me that part of the difficulty is that some people don’t have any “solutions”. Most of us can see the problem but we can’t necessarily see the solution.
Many of the tools that assist teams like mine to capture ideas are designed to do precisely that – capture an idea. The concept of an idea carries with it that sense that someone has managed to come up with a potential solution to a problem. For some people that is where they have an issue. I’ve heard people say that there are things wrong with the way we do “this” or can’t we do “that” better, but if you asked them how something could be improved then they would probably struggle to come up with an answer.
In my world the problem is the key thing. Give me a problem and I can get a team of boffins (Okay, Geeks) to work on a solution and design something that fixes the problem. Think about it … It’s a bit like a doctors surgery or an agony column in a newspaper or magazine. You don’t go to the doctor, generally, because you know what the solution is. You go because there is a problem and you want a solution. Our Innovation programmes need to focus on capturing problems and then assembling the right teams to generate a solution or an idea. Then, and only then, does the idea get tracked through an Innovation programme.
What we really need is a “Dear Madge” column <grin>
