Innovation mad libs
How do you come up with new ideas? Brand new ideas can be difficult to pull out of thin air, but there are plenty of ways to examine things that will bring out new combinations. For example, we’ve had flour, water, tomatoes, and cheese for centuries, but modern pizza is a relatively new invention (1899), a combination of existing ingredients.
The same applies to forms of marketing, and really to any discipline or field of study. For example, suppose you took 3 different ideas and tried to think up some way for them to work together, such as display ads, social media, and Gestalt theory of visual perception. Each discipline has ideas about how things are supposed to work, but when you put them together, you might get something completely unforeseen.
- Gestalt theory of visual perception attempts to explain how the human eye sees (and how the brain interprets it).
- Social media attempts to explain and facilitate human interaction in a digital landscape.
- Display advertising attempts to provide awareness and conversion opportunities for marketers to drive business.
Once you’ve identified your 3 areas, figure out what they have in common. In this example, the logical commonality is us, the human being. What we see (and how we see it) can in turn create interaction. Display advertising can be the vehicle by which we see things, the way things are presented to us. Suppose you had an advertisement that went beyond simple branding or an offer and became a visual puzzle to solve, something that intentionally violated Gestalt theory. Suppose that puzzle required interaction with other people – gathering up your friends to solve it socially, a puzzle that required collaboration.
Now the possibilities start to pop. What would that puzzle look like? How would you create it, build it, and distribute it? I’ve no idea what such a thing would look like, but I’ve now got a basis for creating something, a starting point for a project that could be innovative. Like many things, once you get started, once you get a little momentum, it’s easier to keep things moving forward. Think of this as innovation mad libs.
Let’s pick a few more random examples out of thin air that could be the foundation for blog posts, products, services, maybe even the Next Big Thing.
- Heat maps, social media, interstate traffic
- Health insurance, campaign donations, regression analysis
- Twitter, tea, Kindle publishing platform
Expand this kind of thinking to other areas, to other ways of looking at the world, and you might be surprised at how many untapped innovations have been waiting for you right under your nose.
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Break your addiction to easy
You have an addiction.
It's an addiction no one really talks about, and in fact no one recognizes especially well.
It's an addiction to easy. Easy, easy, easy. You want it. Easy solutions. Easy ideas. Easy software. Easy services. You demand it of your suppliers with catchy phrases like turnkey solution. You demand it of your employees with overly simplified presentations and "dashboards" that require no thought except a glance or two at some colorful charts.
Your addiction is killing your business and making you worthless.
Why?
- Easy means the village idiot can do it. Your value as an employee, a consultant, an expert diminishes with every wave of the easy wand. Why pay a premium for an employee if a task has been made so easy that a minimum wage drone can do it?
- Easy means your competitors can copy you in an instant. If you can buy a push button solution, so can they, and then your competitive advantage vanishes in the swipe of a credit card.
- Easy means your value to your customers disappears. Everyone sells easy, which means that you no longer have a unique selling proposition and a price war is inevitable, destroying your profitability.
- Easy means your resources are depleted. Every time you chase easy, you find that it's never as easy as advertised and you're out time, labor, and money to make it work even close to what the glossy brochure said you were buying.
The really good stuff is hard. Real skill development is hard, a road measured in years or decades of work. Real, raw technological innovation is hard, a pathway littered with trials, errors, and failures. Real research requires intellectual rigor, discipline, and confronting results that make no sense or actively contradict all your hypotheses.
There is no substitute for the hard stuff, not if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. There's no magic bullet, no turnkey solution, no resourceless implementation.
So how do you break your addiction to easy? First you have to understand why you have it.
- Your addiction to easy comes from distraction. With so many things vying for your attention, you're lured by promises of something that requires no commitment.
- Your addiction to easy comes from being overwhelmed. With so much stuff on your to do list, you want things that hold the promise of moving to "done" quickly and painlessly.
- Your addiction to easy comes from discomfort. With so many new things appearing all the time, your desire to stay in your comfort zone breeds a longing for easy paths into the new stuff.
The antidote to these causes, the antidote to the addiction of easy is focus. The ability and the will to focus will cause your sources of addiction to wither and crumble. Focus and distractions lose their grip over your productivity. Focus, and items move off your to do list more quickly without resorting to tricks. Focus, and stepping outside your comfort zone in a logical, orderly, planned manner becomes less frightening, allowing you to take one step at a time outside that area of comfort.
If you can focus, if you can hone your mind and abilities to work in a coordinated fashion, if you can break the bonds of distraction, then suddenly easy becomes suspect. Easy reveals itself as a mirage or a quagmire. Easy reveals itself as a scam of an overly slick salesman.
Once you have transcended your addiction to easy, you're on the path towards unlocking more of your potential, your capability, as a person, as an employee, as a company, while your competitors remain stuck in the swamp of easy.
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Adding Steps of Value
If you're having trouble achieving some of your sales and marketing goals, it may be because you have too few steps in your process. "Too few steps? I'm already drowning in complexity!" you say. Allow me to explain. Think of sales and marketing like a staircase. If the leap between existing steps is too high, the stairway is unhelpful. Add a step or two here or there and suddenly the stairway becomes useful again.
Take a look at your sales and marketing processes. Examine your funnel for severe gaps between one stage and the next, and if there's a major gap, consider adding a step or two. Those steps need to provide value (in order to keep you climbing the staircase) but need to be added in order for you to get to the top of the stairs (a sale).
Here's an example. Suppose I leap out onto Twitter and start shouting to everyone, "Buy my book!". There might some initial interest, but if that's all I had, you'd get bored really quickly, and so would I. I have too few steps between presence and pitch. To mitigate that, I put steps of value in between showing up on Twitter and making a pitch. I put out a good morning message, followed by #the5, followed by a weekly wrapup of #the5, and finally in that newsletter, there's a recurring pitch for the book, which sells from that particular ad. I put steps containing value between presence and pitch both to create social currency and reduce the bluntness of a pitch. As long as the steps provide value, you'll get to the top.
Obviously, there's a corollary warning: a staircase that rises 6 feet and contains 72 miniature steps is equally unhelpful. People will get tired out climbing every inch-high step and simply jump off. Let your marketing and sales analytics tell you how smooth the journey is from bottom to top and adjust accordingly so that people get to the top with just the right number of steps.
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