Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

FINDING NEW CONCEPTS 167
context and to determine what the offering would look like and
what its value proposition would be.
Organizational Creativity
How does an organization or a person generate concepts with
the potential to create new categories or subcategories? How can
an organization foster conceptual creativity that will result in an
offering that will drive a new business? It turns out that creativity
has been studied extensively. Drawing on this research there
are certain observations and guidelines that apply to the search
for market changing new offerings.
Be Curious. Curiosity is the mother of invention. It is important
to be curious about why a weird, unexpected event happens,
why an unexplained observation appears, or why a certain constraint
exists. Toyota famously has the five-why approach —a
problem is addressed by successfully posing the question Why?
until the most basic issue is uncovered (I know a two - year - old
who would be a terrific innovator by this logic).
Soak in Information. Information is the lifeblood of invention.
Those people and organizations that have wide knowledge
bases will be able do the mixing and matching that is often
the basis of innovation. An organization needs to be a bit like
an ant colony with tentacles continuously determining what
is changing in the environment and what could be changed.
As in an ant colony there should be a relentless pursuit of useful
information and an ability to act on that information in a
timely fashion.
The story is told of Charles Draper, who spent twenty years
going to school, mostly at MIT, gaining knowledge in fi elds like
psychology, electrochemical engineering, and physics. One of
the most inventive scientists of his day, he has been called the
“ father of inertial guidance, ” and the scope of his knowledge