I first wrote this article a decade ago following a great session exploring ways to brainstorm. The story still sticks strong with me - by simply asking the question "how would someone else in a different industry solve this problem", we can generate so many new ideas.
Role-play was another option – give everyone in the business a pretend role in a different organisation. How would Apple solve it? How would Coca-Cola solve it? How would YO! Sushi solve it? There is so many ways to generate new ideas – and I hope you enjoy this one.
While "Open Innovation" in its true sense is nothing new, there are many great yet under-utilised ways to achieve breakthrough results for your innovation projects. The secret? Looking beyond your industry's conventional wisdom.
Throwing "Not Made Here" in the Bin
Open innovation is about looking outside your company boundaries to seek the best ideas and solutions for your innovation activities. Effectively, we're taking the "not made here" mentality and throwing it where it should be—firmly in the bin.
But here's the problem: most companies don't think widely enough when seeking sources of information.
The Chocolate Coated Crisp Challenge
A perfect example emerged during one of our workshops when we were developing new ideas within the confectionary sector. We posed a seemingly simple question: "How can you make a chocolate coated crisp?"
The immediate response from a confectionary expert was definitive: "It can't be done. The crisps would break during the chocolate coating process, which would require tumbling."
That response missed a small but essential point. What it should have said was: "It can't be done using the existing knowledge and limitations within our industry."
The Secret Formula: Features, Benefits, and Applications
Good salespeople always differentiate between Features and Benefits. But good innovation managers need to add a third crucial element to this equation: Application.
Here's how to define each:
Feature: A distinctive characteristic
Benefit: The value derived
Application: The specific properties associated for use within the given sector
Take a contactless payment card as an example. The features include data transfer speed and transmission distance. The benefits include reduced purchase time and shorter queues. The applications cover small transactions in shops or motorway toll booths.
Removing the Application Changes Everything
Now here's where it gets interesting. Remove the application and ask: "What industry requires a technology that provides contactless data transfer at a given distance to make things move faster?"
Suddenly, you're thinking about event ticketing, clocking systems, and any scenario where queues create delays. You've just discovered multiple new applications for the same technology.
Back to Those Impossible Chocolate Crisps
Let's apply this thinking to our confectionary challenge. Remove the application and reframe the question: "What methods can be used to coat a number of small, relatively fragile objects with a semi-solid coating that dries relatively quickly?"
By making the problem more "open," we invited solutions from other sectors.
Within five minutes, we progressed from "it can't be done" to having three different viable ideas from other industries:
- A coating process borrowed from another sector
- A semi-permanent toughening process
- A complete process change called "just-in-time coating"—providing the crisp and chocolate separately, with the crisp dipped immediately before eating (think choc-dips!)
The Power of Multiplication
Whether the thought of chocolate coated crisps excites you or turns your stomach isn't the point. The point is this: by temporarily removing the application, you make problems open to new solutions and solutions open to new applications.
You've just multiplied your potential sources of new ideas by at least an order of magnitude.
Your Next Steps
Still stuck for ideas? Try this exercise:
- Define your challenge in terms of features and benefits
- Strip away the industry-specific application
- Ask what other industries face similar challenges
- Explore how they've solved them
- Adapt their solutions to your context
Open innovation isn't just about looking outside your company—it's about looking outside your industry's self-imposed limitations. The breakthrough you need might already exist in a completely different sector. You just need to know where to look.
