An amusing take on generating new ideas — try your luck, this might work better than a slots machine.
On a more serious note, there are several “structured innovation” techniques that actually work — the one that I had a chance to study sometime back is TRIZ. Check it out!
Latest posts by Alok Mittal (see all)
- Promoters or Entrepreneurs – A choice for Private Equity players - August 3, 2019
- Startup Marathon Mindset - March 25, 2019
- What’s your Customer Culture? - March 4, 2019
Deepak, I have read Taleb and I think the context of what he says is very different from that of structured innovation. There will be accidental innovation, perhaps even in majority. Unfortunately, that does not give an actionable route to companies looking at doing it. Taleb is not fatalistic when talking about accidents.
TRIZ kind of stuff is very effective is “bounded innovation” — when there are multiple constraints against which you are trying to innovate. It gives you some possible generic directions of thinking to break the constraints.
I’m not so sure structured innovation is the way to go. Stuff like polythene, penicillin, post-its and even Viagra. were discovered by accident. The laser was invented to help study molecular structures. The Internet was a military connectivity experiment.
Innovations don’t necessarily rise out of structure – and there’s this guy called Nassim Taleb who says that seemingly improbable events like accidental discovery occur more often than a mathematician would plot on a bell curve. He calls them “black swans” – what would seem to be very improbable events happen way more often than you could imagine. So innovation entirely by accident is probably going to happen more than ever. In fact, he says “trial and error” seems to work better than structure!
http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/23/nicholas-taleb-innovation-tech-cz_07rev_nt_0524taleb.html
(Just playing devil’s advocate)
Subprime mortgage was “structured innovation” too…don’t get me started..
Well now when it comes to “Structured Innovation Techniques”, we once had been taught the “Jigsaw Puzzle” strategy at school, where u innovate an idea/ a strategy or a concept using Intelligent Information Pieces (IIP).
Now intelligent information pieces may be newspaper reports, blog, information from friends and when u join the pieces together u will get an Idea. For example…u read on newspaper that Nokia is trialling Mobile Tv services worldwide using DVB-H standards and u read on content sutra that government is planning to delicence spectrum for mobile TV and u heard that DD is trialling mobile TV in India and Mediaflo is looking forward for startups to take up it;s mediaflo technology……now ur friend apraoches u with a plan to start some thing on the mobile space……..Now u combine all this information and decides to launch a cellular operator independent mobile Tv service making use of all this information…….well this is just an example for the “Jigsaw Puzzle Strategy” !
Eurekaaaaaaa…………thanks to IDEA Generator….i have found out a gr8 idea…”Erotic Virtual Sex Toy 🙂 ” ..Shall i sent the business plan to Alok for funding….well jokes apart though the application seems fun..I believe real Innovation and Idea can only come out from a human brain and if any that such an idea generating machine comes out in the market…other similar products will follow….Automatic Movie Script writing software(So u don’t need script writers any more)…Automatic Lyrics Writing machines which automaticaly produces song lyrics based on situations .
Anyway thanks Alok for making venturewoods interesting and exciting every day!