The Innovator’s Tool Kit by Dr. Ralph Katz is published by Harvard Business Press, Boston, 2009 and includes 10 practical strategies to help you develop and implement innovation. Whatever you do in life, you are doing some sort of innovation. If you find a better way or one that is more suited to you, you have innovated. If you have thought is there a better method? is there a solution to my problem? then you have innovated. Whether you have taken the idea to the market, the market has embraced it and you and your company made money, that is a different story. However we are all innovators because we want to do something easier, better, less expensive, needed to create better efficiencies, we innovate to solve a problem. The book also includes charts and questions to help you, if you rather look on line try http://www.elearning.hbsp.org/businesstools. The important thing a book such as this one does for you is help you focus and bring ideas to market.

The idea generation is the easiest one, if you challenged everyone in your group or company to bring one idea a week or two weeks for the rest of the year you would have generated hundreds of ideas. Some are just ideas whose time has not come yet, some of ideas which could lead to something, some will be ideas that lead to something and some will go on the way to implementation. What you should see is the funnel approach – many ideas in, a few come out for lots of reasons.

Assuming you have a company that wants the ideas, which is an excellent start, then you have to find resources to determine how much money they cost to implement and if some look like they are winners, you need champions in the company to bring them up to getting approved in the company’s budget to be implement. There is a wonderful museum in upstate New York which collects retail products that made the shelf space in stores and fail to deliver sales. The reason the museum is wonderful, is it shows there is not a lack of ideas in the marketplace. After coming up with an idea or ideas, the next step is who is the idea for? what can we do with this? are great questions to ask. One method is see the buyer utility chart developed by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in the Harvard article “Knowing a Winning Idea When You See One” the six stages of the buyer experience cycle of purchase, delivery, use, supplements, maintenance, and disposal are one side of the graph. The other side is the six utility servers of collective productivity, simplicity, convenience, risk, fun and image, and environmental friendliness. The mapping helps you provide the business case for the idea. Eventually an idea only works if you sell more things.

After you have determined the case for the idea, then you have to fit into the company’s plans. What are the company’s strategies and long-term objectives? do you have the people to implement it? who wants to champion or sponsor the idea. Champions have the ability to give resources to the idea and have a good sense of timing in the company. If you do not have champions you may have the best idea in the world, it is just not going anywhere in the company. Champions spend their time on the RWW Method – Is it real? Can We Win? Is it Worth Doing? Questions such as in the market real? is the product real? can the product be competitive? can out company be competitive? will the product be profitable at an acceptable risk/ does the launching of the product make strategic sense? If you answers to those questions and more, the next step is trying it out.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, companies which are making money like it if they do the same thing year and year and continue to make money. That may work in a few industry groups but for most industry groups there is a great amount of change in the marketplace. It is reasonable to ask the senior management how much of their revenues is coming from products or services more than 5 years old and how much is coming from new ones? what were the latest products that were introduced and with all the resources behind the products how did the market like them or buy them? In hindsight and with a bias of being a shareholder you can see if the latest ideas are good.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions