Chapter 4:
Generating Innovative Ideas: Building A
Front-End Ideas System
Ken Hudson
About the author
Ken Hudson, BBus (UTS), MBA (UNE), PhD (UWS)
Dr Ken Hudson has over 16
years
senior management experience in
marketing, advertising, direct marketing and management consulting,
including a position as the marketing director of American
Express.
His interest in the role of ideas and innovation in the
corporate cycle emerged from conversations with senior managers
about their self-confessed lack of expertise in creating,
evaluating and implementing new products and services.
This led Ken to form High Performance Thinking, a business
consulting, coaching and training company that specialises in
unlocking the growth potential of people, brands and
businesses.
Ken is a lively, engaging presenter, trainer, coach and
facilitator. He is a
part-time
lecturer at the University of
Technology Sydney, where he teaches
Marketing creativity
,a
postgraduate subject that he designed.
Ken has written many articles on improving the performance of
brands, businesses,
teams
and individuals by developing different
and more powerful
mindsets
. He has been interviewed by the
Australian Financial Review
and
The Boss Magazine
,and
is currently writing a book on creativity, entitled
Mind
Breaks.
To find out more about Ken and his work, visit
www.highperformancethinking.com.au
Ken Hudson can be reached at
ken@highperformancethinking.com.au
Executive summary
Innovation
drives
growth, profitability and sustainability. This
chapter argues that the ability to innovate is the primary
capability that every leader and business needs. But although most
managers understand the importance of innovation, they
dont understand how to do it.
A useful way to think about innovation is to break it into two
parts
: the front-end (concept development) and the back-end
(implementation). Contrary to prevailing logic, it is the front-end
that poses the biggest challenge for managers. This is because the
front-end tends to be fuzzy,
chaotic
and experimental, which is at
odds with the largely rational, analytical processes taught at most
business
schools
.
To
overcome
this
hurdle
, this chapter
presents
a four-stage
system for generating front-end ideas:
-
building an individual and collective idea mindset
-
developing a shared understanding of a range of idea
concepts
-
learning and applying a number of idea tools
-
embedding a number of idea practices.
This four-stage system will greatly improve your
chances
of
developing
breakthrough
, business-building ideas.
Introduction
Every business started with an idea. Every new growth initiative
will begin with an idea. Yet for most businesses, the generation of
ideas, which is the lifeblood of their
continued
survival, is
ignored or, at best, left to chance. My belief is that this
situation is not sustainable.
In this chapter I will outline how you can greatly increase your
chances
of innovation success by adopting a more systematic
approach to concept development. Why is this important? Because it
is the front-end of the innovation process that for many managers
causes the most difficulty.
From my experience, nearly all
leaders
in recent times have been
schooled exclusively in a cost-cutting mindset. As a result they
have almost lost their ability to think in a more imaginative way.
This will not be a problem if their operating environment does not
change, but it
presents
a real dilemma if there is a new
competitive threat, a shift in a consumer trend or if a new
technology emerges.
It is not enough to tell managers that they need to be more
innovative. They have to be given the right mindset, tools,
concepts and practices to help them along their journey of
imagination
. For most managers this is an uncomfortable trip but it
is a competency that every manager must possess. The good news is
that concept development can be learned and enhanced, though for
some it will not be easy. It requires effort, passion and
commitment. Most of all, it requires leadership. Innovation cannot
be delegatedit is far too important. The very
growth of your brands, business and yourself depends on it.
My aim in this chapter is to provide practising managers with a
road map to help them begin or enhance their innovative
performance. Your competition can copy a single idea, but will find
it very difficult to
mimic
a systematic, front-end idea
capability.