10 Proven Methods To Innovate

10 PROVEN METHODS
TO INNOVATE YOUR
WAY TO SUCCESS
By Jacob Nielson of
www.TheInnovativeManager.com
2
This ebook is dedicated to my family for all the support and

encouragement they have given me throughout the years.
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10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

3
10 PROVEN METHODS
TO INNOVATE YOUR
WAY TO SUCCESS
Hi Fellow Innovator,
Thank you for downloading my free ebook. In 2011 I had an experience that
changed my life forever. I was hired by a large organization to study innovation
methods and help the company transform itself into an innovation powerhouse. I
spent every day going to work searching online, reading books and summarizing
all my material into PowerPoint slides that I would present to management. It was
an amazing experience and I feel so grateful and lucky that I had it. When that proj-
ect ended, I was hired to put those frameworks to use as a new product manager
for one of the company’s most important product lines. Ever since then, I’ve been
implementing those frameworks and learning first hand which ones work and which
ones don’t. The following are the 10 best that I’ve found so far that I know from per-
sonal experience actually work.
Whatever your goals are with this book, whether it be to start a business or boost
your career within a business,
I wish you the very best and
hope that these materials can If you would like to reach out to me
help you in your journey. for whatever reason, please feel free to do so via
email, Twitter or Facebook at the addresses below.
Jacob Nielson I’d love to hear from you!
Email: jake@theinnovativemanager.com
Twitter: @jakenielson
Facebook: facebook.com/theinnovativemanager
Google Plus: Profile Link

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Table of contents
Introduction..................................................................................... 5
1. Theory of Disruptive Innovation................................................ 5
2. Outcome Driven Innovation AKA “Jobs To Be Done”............. 8
3. Connecting The Dots................................................................. 9
4. InVENNtion................................................................................ 11
5. Blue Ocean Strategy................................................................ 15
6. Systematic Inventive Thinking................................................ 19
7. SCAMPER ................................................................................ 20
8. The Innovators DNA ................................................................ 24
9. So What? Who Cares? Why You?® ......................................... 26
10. Human Centered Design ...................................................... 31
Conclusion to the ebook.............................................................. 36

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Introduction
I have combed the internet, spoken with numerous innovators, worked with consul-
tants and worked in marketing and product management for years all while in search
of the highest quality tools and methods for innovation that I could find. What I found
throughout this journey has changed my life and helped me think differently about
business, products and entrepreneurship ever since. Below is the list of some of the
best content that I found - I hope these ideas become as useful for you as they have
been for me. Please note that some of the concepts listed below are touched on brief-
ly while others are given more extensive treatment. I plan to cover each one individual-
ly in subsequent blog posts but for now I wanted to give you exposure to the ten best
frameworks that I have come across so far. After you’ve finished reading this ebook,
I would love to hear some of the ideas and tools you have found to be useful as well.
Feel free to send me an email or a message on Facebook with your thoughts.
1. Theory of Disruptive Innovation

By Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School Professor
This theory and consequent framework has had by far the biggest impact on my think-
ing regarding innovation. I discuss the theory extensively in a blog post and on the
HBR Blog you can find a short 8-minute presentation by Clayton Christensen where
he gives a brief overview. A full explanation of this idea is found in Christensen’s book
“The Innovators Dilemma.” A short summary of this concept is that often the reason
small start-ups and entrepreneurs are able to “disrupt” large organizations and indus-
tries is by introducing products that are dramatically more simple, intuitive and easy
to use versus the complicated, over-designed products made by incumbent industry
players. This simplification, or de-featuring, allows for many more people to utilize the
new product in a way that is most meaningful for them. There are three major points to
consider with disruptive innovation
Customers Can Only Use So Many Features

Often companies with vast resources will design new products and services with the
assumption that customers always want more - more features, more options and more
performance. However, Christensen’s work brought to light the fact that too often cus-
tomers may actually want less. This can happen for various reasons

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99The product is too expensive

99The product is too complicated and requires extensive training
99The customer only needs the product to do one thing well rather than several
things adequately
Disruptive Innovation Model
Sophisticated Users
Average Users
Basic Users
Overserved Customers = Disruptive Opportunity

Have you ever used a product that was so powerful and complicated that when you
bought it you didn’t even know where to begin? That’s the way I felt when I first used
Microsoft OneNote. It is a note taking program that had every feature and Microsoft
Office integration imaginable. At first I was excited. I watched the promo video it came
with and saw all the incredible capabilities it had built in. But after trying to use it for
a few days I often found myself reverting back to my tried-and-true pen and paper
notebook. I didn’t like the pen and paper approach for several reasons (slow, not
searchable, perishable, etc.) but I loved the simplicity and flexibility of it. That’s when
I realized that buying OneNote may have been a mistake. So instead of trying to force

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myself to use it, I started looking for other options. As I searched the internet I came
across Evernote. It was a nice, simple and free web-based note taking program. I
started using it and discovered two things:
99Evernote was far less sophisticated than OneNote (no Office integration)
99It was simple and easy to use
99Best of all, it was free
After a while I found myself naturally gravitating toward using Evernote and leaving my
pen and paper behind. Evernote as a company has continued to prosper and today is
a powerhouse brand in note taking software.
This story goes to show that anytime a group of customers is overserved, either by
too many features, cost or complicated interfaces, there is a disruptive opportunity for
an entrepreneur to create a simpler, more cost effective solution.
Disrupt Your Own Products Before A Competitor Does

If your goal is to maintain long-term success you will most likely be confronted with
the following dilemma (this is the dilemma Christensen refers to): continue to build
premium, high profit products for your highest paying customers or create a lower-
cost solution that does one thing
well but that cannibalizes your
premium products with simpler, “If you don’t cannibalize
lower profit margin product. The yourself, someone else will.”
answer to this dilemma has of-
ten been to protect the premium
products by building in more fea-
— Steve Jobs
tures and more capabilities. The
problem with this route is that
though you may salvage your profit margins on a per product basis, you expose your
business to the substantial risk of losing customers who opt for a simpler solution
offered by a competitor - in many cases a new competitor that you don’t even know
about yet.
The way out of this dilemma is to go down the road of cannibalizing your existing
products. For many companies, this is a gut-wrenching decision that requires some

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soul searching. As an example, think of how Garmin, the GPS manufacturer, felt when
Google came out with Navigation built into Android? By then it’s almost too late. How-
ever it makes me wonder if inside of Garmin did they ever have the conversation of
whether or not they should go into purely software based navigation? I can imagine
that if they did have that conversation they may have concluded it was a bad idea
because it would cannibalize their lucrative hardware sales. Unfortunately I don’t know
what exactly happened but whatever decision they came to, they did not adequately
anticipate Google’s entry into navigation and they are suffering because of it.
Conclusion
This theory is so powerful that I plan to expand on in much more on the blog as well
as in subsequent ebooks. I am currently finalizing an overall process of how to use
this concept to your advantage and once that is done I will offer an ebook on it. Stay
tuned...
2. Outcome Driven Innovation AKA

“Jobs To Be Done”
By Anthony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn
This concept allows entrepreneurs, product managers and researchers to peel away
the layers of customer wants and wishes to ultimately get to the core value that cus-
tomers seek - successfully completing the job to be done. Thanks to a full endorse-
ment from Clayton Christensen who based his book “The Innovator’s Solution” on the
idea of “Jobs To Be Done,” Tony Ulwick’s Outcome Driven Innovation method and
vocabulary is going mainstream among business leaders and innovators across the
globe. Ulwick summarized this
concept in his book titled “What
Customers Want” as well as in a “People don’t want to buy
post on his blog. The center of a quarter-inch drill. They want
the concept is that people hire
products and services to help a quarter-inch hole.”
them accomplish a particular job.
For example, I hired this laptop — Theodore Levitt
computer to give me access to

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content I care about and to help

me communicate with my friends,
“The job the customer is family and coworkers. In this
trying to get done will offer the example there are two jobs that I
hired the computer to do:
stable, long-term focal point
99 Give me access to content I
around which value creation care about
should be centered.”
99 Help me communicate with
— Anthony Ulwick my friends, family and coworkers
Additionally there are metrics
associated with each job to be
done, called “outcomes,” and by listing those metrics and understanding the metrics
that are under or over served you can innovate by creating product ideas that improve
those specific metrics that the customer is currently unsatisfied with. I plan to explore
this topic in detail later on in separate posts. For now though, Ulwick describes this
process on his blog -here- and gives an overview of the entire concept with a nice
graphic -here-.
3. Connecting The Dots

By Jacob Nielson - Inspired By Steve Jobs
Connecting the dots came about during my extensive study of Apple and Steve Jobs.
The more I read books on him, namely his biography, and viewed his talks, the more I
came across this idea of “connect-
ing the dots.” Then one day I read
about how Jon Rubenstein, who “Creativity is just con-
worked at Apple in early 2000’s, was necting things.”
looking for ways to create an ad-
vanced portable media player (later — Steve Jobs
known as the iPod) and happened
to be on a trip to visit Toshiba where
he saw a 1.8 inch hard drive. When
he saw how small it was he knew he had a use for it - even though Toshiba didn’t
know what to do with it. In his mind, he connected the dots between what he experi-
enced that day and what he was trying to accomplish with the iPod. The idea of con-

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Connecting Experience Dots Matrix
necting the dots is simple: everyday you experience new things whether you recog-
nize it or not. Innovation can come when you connect experiences you have with what
you are trying to accomplish. Another powerful example of this principle is the story
of Philo Farnsworth who while plowing a field on his family farm noticed that the lines
on the field eventually formed an image - this insight led him to the concept of forming
images on a screen by scanning a series of lines which later became the television.
To put this idea to work for you, consider the following areas of your life: education,
“When you ask a creative person how they did some-

thing, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really
do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them
after awhile. That’s because they were able to connect ex-
periences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”
— Steve Jobs

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work, hobbies and other interests. These categories provide broad buckets to use
in identifying what makes you unique. As you fill out these buckets, preferably using
images and other visualizations, start to think through how some of these might be
connected. In Philo Farnsworth’s case, two major things in his life were science and
farming. Later on he decided to focus his science efforts around the idea of movable
images, or television. As he thought through the experiences he had while plowing as
a farmer he realized that the lines created in the field would generate an image when
looked at from a distance. This insight led him to the idea of creating images through
scanning and displaying a series of lines electronically. This led to the first electronic
television.
Connecting the dots is a simple but profound way to spark your personal creativity
and maximize the unique combination of experiences you have had in your life to cre-
ate something new and useful for the world.
4. InnVENNtion™
By Jacob Nielson, Creator of The Innovative Manager
While studying various stories of innovation, I was surprised to hear a few recurring

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themes. One of these was the idea of connecting the dots. Another was the con-
cept that innovation occurred at the intersection of two or more generally unrelated
products or ideas. For example, when Apple announces a new product, often they
will mention the idea that their company is at the intersection of technology and lib-
eral arts. To illustrate this intersection, I like to use Venn diagrams (hence the term
InVENNtion™) because thinking through the implications of the diagram can lead to
new insights. So if we think about this intersection between technology and liberal
arts, we begin to realize it’s inspirational power. For most people, technology is often
viewed in the following terms:
• Science
• Engineering
• Hardware
• Electronics
• Software
From this list you can see that technology is a “hard” term that often connotes the
embodiment of various technical components. At its most basic level, technology is
most often thought of in utilitarian terms - something that could be used to make living
life more efficient.
Now consider liberal arts. Words often ascribed to the term liberal arts include:

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• Literature
• Philosophy
• Poetry
• Fine art
• Calligraphy
With the term liberal arts you feel a sense of beauty, elegance and refinement. Addi-
tionally, you can see that this term is comprised of things that uplift and inspire. In its
truest form, liberal arts can be thought of as something that stirs the soul in a way that
makes living life more enjoyable and meaningful.
Now think about how those two terms - technology and liberal arts - could intersect.
The intersection would have to be something technical, science and engineering in-
tensive while also being beautiful, inspiring and philosophically meaningful. Sound
familiar? That is the exact description that many Apple fans ascribe to the majority of
their products. This is the whole idea behind InVENNtion™. By using this framework
it’s easy to see that Apple’s culture and design strategy sits squarely at this intersec-
tion. Even from the very beginning, Steve
Jobs had always enjoyed the beauty of
calligraphy. This is what drove him to
include sans serif fonts on the first Ma-
cintosh and is what led him to forming
teams of poets, musicians and artists to
work for him on many of his most famous
projects such as the iMac.
One thing to note before we move on is

that this example is still fairly broad and
general in nature. For Apple, being at the
intersection of technology and liberal arts
is more of an abstract statement of com-
pany culture than a concrete guideline
for ideation (though it certainly can help
in ideation). However, the InVENNtion™
framework is useful at any level along
the abstraction continuum. For example,
if I were to have chosen the words “Car
Stereo” and “Wifi,” I could come up with
several specific ideas that might exist at

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the intersection of those two terms.

One idea that comes to mind is hav-
ing my car stereo sync music, mov- “InVENNtion is a simple
ies, games and maps to a hard drive but powerful formula for
in my car by connecting via Wifi to
my home network when it’s parked helping to define anything
in the garage at night. If my car did from broad cultural guide-
this, I would never have to worry lines to specific product
about losing internet connectivity
while out on the road or the need
characteristics.”
to use cd’s or hookup my phone or
mp3 player to listen to my music. It
would all be synced automatically.
Let’s now discuss how you can put this idea to work in your innovation efforts. A good
way to start is to write out a circle and label it with your industry or domain of exper-
tise. Then draw another circle and label it with another industry or domain of exper-
tise. You can almost do this at random and still come up with interesting, and hope-
fully useful ideas. The car with wifi idea above was a completely made up random
association that I made.
Adjacent Spaces
Though random associations can work, it’s often more useful to start with your own
industry, product or realm of expertise then associate it with what some like to call
“adjacent spaces.” These associations often happen much more naturally and can
lead to quick and highly feasible ideas. For example, most of Apple’s major innova-
tions have happened because they decided to enter a market (or “space”) that was
adjacent to their core computer market. In 2001, Apple entered the personal music
player market with the introduction of the iPod. In 2007, they entered the cell phone
business with the introduction of the iPhone. Rumors now swirl that Apple’s next big
thing will be an entry into the television market by introducing what some expect to be
called the iTV (the name “Apple TV” is already taken). Similar to what Apple did, most
businesses that have reached a revenue plateau, either through market share domi-
nance or because the market they are in is about to decline, look to expand by build-
ing out adjacent spaces and incorporating them into their businesses. What adjacent
spaces should your business consider entering? How long before those spaces con-
verge naturally regardless of what your business does?

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New (Sometimes Random) Spaces

Some managers are able to foresee the convergence of adjacent spaces. Steve Jobs
was a master at anticipating these convergence points and often successfully capital-
ized on these changes. But let’s suppose that you want to really push the envelope
of wild ideas. Let’s assume you want to think up wild ideas and you have the time
and resources to go all the way - or what Google refers to as “Moon Shots!” In these
cases, it’s often more useful to think through associations that at first may seem totally
random but after careful contemplation may yield new and interesting ideas. Try it for
yourself and if you delay judgement of the idea until later, you’ll likely generate a new
and useful idea.
I hope the InVENNtion™ framework becomes as useful for you as it has been for me.

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5. Blue Ocean Strategy

By W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
The term “Blue Ocean” stems from the idea that there are opportunities in each busi-
ness to move from the ultra competitive battles around price and features (red ocean)
into a new market reality where your typical competitors are essentially irrelevant. To
enable this new scenario, Blue Ocean Strategy, which is fully explained in their book,
is a framework for innovation and product strategy that utilizes the “strategy canvas.”
Smartphone Strategy Canvas

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This canvas is a graph that quickly illustrates the value curve your products provide
versus the competition across a number of metrics important to the customer. For
example, if we created a strategy canvas for smartphones the attributes along the
bottom might include processing power, screen size, thickness, battery life, camera,
sd card, etc. The y-axis would represent relative (e.g. 1-5) scores for each device
compared and a line would be drawn connecting the ratings for each attribute. After
creating a strategy canvas, Kim and Mauborgne teach that the pathway to success-
ful innovation lies in doing a unique combination of one to four things to your prod-
uct, namely: 1) Raise, 2) Reduce, 3) Eliminate, 4) Create. I’ll briefly expand on each of
these concepts.
Raise
Continuing the smartphone example, back in 2011, Motorola wanted to capitalize
on the storied Razr brand of old by creating the worlds thinnest smartphone. Toward
the end of the year, they announced the Droid Razr - a 7mm thin smartphone. This
was quite the engineering feat because at the time most smartphones were hover-
ing around 9-15mm. From a blue ocean perspective, Motorola essentially “raised” the
thinness of their design to a level previously unheard of for premium smartphones and
solidified a competitive edge for that product.
Though Motorola engineers may or may not have used the strategy canvas to come
up with this idea (they probably just wanted to repeat the success of the original Razr
flip phone), if they had used it they would have quickly identified their competitive po-
sition in the market and recognized ways they could stand above the crowd of smart-
phone releases.
The iPhone is another example of using “raise” to gain a competitive edge. With every
mid-cycle refresh of their iPhone models - when they add an “S” to the model - they
seem to usually focus on, among other things, vastly improving the camera on the de-
vice. I’ve owned both the Droid Razr and an iPhone 4S and the camera on the iPhone
4S was remarkably good compared with the Razr and other devices I’ve used.
What attributes would you “raise” with your product or service?
Reduce

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In some cases, especially with regard to disruptive situations, reducing the perfor-
mance level of a particular attribute is the right strategy. This is where the smartphone
example illustrates a design trade-off decision. For most smartphones the objective is
to maximize battery life. However, what if you decided to prioritize that objective lower
than the objective to make the phone as thin as possible? The result of that question
would be that you would end up “raising” the thinness of the phone at the expense of
the life of the battery. This is not the most desirable conclusion to reach but may still
yield a market advantage if you can claim the world’s thinnest smartphone like Mo-
torola did in 2011.
However if you think about the idea of reduction in light of disruptive innovation you
start to see an interesting corollary. In disruptive innovation a product reaches a point
where it is overserving the majority of its intended users. If you can identify the specif-
ic features or benefits that are overserved, using Blue Ocean strategy canvas you will
know which feature or benefit to reduce and what the overall product/benefit profile
should look like. To me, this is a fascinating use of the two frameworks and I will plan
to explore this in later detail on the blog.
Eliminate
Sometimes the best thing to do with an existing idea is eliminate elements and think
through what could emerge. In the smartphone example, Apple decided to completely
eliminate the SD card slot. But the idea of removing an SD slot isn’t a very game
changing innovation. However, when you start to think about what Apple eliminated
when they first introduced the iPhone - namely the physical keyboard - that was a
significant step. Another example of eliminate would be Redbox. For a time, Block-
buster ruled the movie rental business by having a nationwide brick-and-mortar store
presence. This wide distribution was credited for the company’s success and the main
reason it was hard for other rental businesses to compete. However, by the late 90’s
and early 2000’s, Redbox had decided that brick-and-mortar stores were not needed
and instead focused on the idea of distributing rentals through vending machines.
They basically eliminated the store and created a new value driver with the DVD vend-
ing machine. Later on companies like Netflix and Amazon took the idea of eliminate
one step further by offering rentals online.
The most important thing about the idea of eliminate is to think through it with a clean
slate perspective. In other words, don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that you
must leverage your existing resources with every new idea. The reason this is a trap

19
is because new startups don’t have

those constraints and often can come “Don’t get caught in
up with vastly better ideas that ignore the trap of thinking that you
existing business models or resources.
In Blockbuster’s case, they may have
must leverage your existing
thought of new ideas such as DVD resources with every new
vending but didn’t want to pursue them idea”
because doing so would cannibalize
their existing business model. I think
Blockbuster had many good ideas sur-
face at their company but chose not to pursue them because doing so would ignore
their brick-and-mortar presence and all the resources and capital they had tied up in
those resources.
Create
Another tool in the Blue Ocean strategy framework is the idea of creating a new value
driver for the product or service in question. Back to the smartphone example, when
Google announced the Moto X in 2013, it offered something that had never been done
before with smartphones - complete color customization. Previous phones usually
came in either one or two colors at the most. With the Moto X, anyone could go on-
line and choose their own color scheme which would then be manufactured to those
specifications in Texas then shipped out from there. The max period of time from plac-
ing the order to getting the phone was promised to be 6 days.
By allowing customers to customize their phone’s colors according to their specific

preferences, Google in essence created a new way for smartphones to provide value.
By doing so, they essentially made themselves the only option in the market for that
particular value proposition. Instead of competing on specs, features or price, Google
created a “blue ocean” for themselves by enabling consumers to experience some-
thing completely new and different.
Conclusion
With Blue Ocean strategy, innovators are able to systematically think through ways to
create value for their target customers versus the competition. Obviously with each
idea generated, more analysis would be necessary to validate whether those specific

20
ideas were valuable to customers but the Blue Ocean Strategy approach provides a
fast and analytical approach to ideation and innovation.
6. Systematic Inventive Thinking

By SIT Ltd.
Created by SIT Ltd. - website here - SIT is a simple but effective innovation method
that uses five thought provoking principles to elicit powerful ideas. I have found these
ideas to be useful as quick brainstorming primers. These principles are:
Subtraction
What if you removed a seemingly essential component from a product? What if some-
one removed the keyboard from a smartphone? Hint: the iPhone did this when it
launched without a hardware keyboard.
Multiplication
What if you took a key component of the product and added another copy of it? The
best example of this is the double (or triple/quadruple/quintuple) bladed razor. Shav-
ing razor companies such as Gillette and Schick have used the principle of multiplica-
tion to come up with blockbuster innovations. The key is - would another copy of this
component add value? In some cases, the answer could definitely be yes.
Division
What if you split the product (or service) apart into disparate components and re-ar-
ranged them in a new and unique way? One example of this is when car radio manu-
facturers (particularly the aftermarket radio manufacturers) started selling designs that
enabled the face of the system to be removed. Doing so enabled the owner to remove
the face and reduce the possibility of the car being broken into and having the ra-
dio stolen. The key here is to answer the question: would a modular approach to this
product or service add value to the consumer?

21
Task Unification
The idea of task unification is to assign a new and additional task to an existing prod-
uct or service. When Arm and Hammer realized their baking soda could be used as an
effective deodorizer for refrigerators, their marketing messages started reflecting this
and their sales took off. The product
was originally designed for baking but
customers realized another valuable
application and thus unified the addi-
“Can this product be
tional task of deodorizing with Arm and utilized for another purpose
Hammer baking soda. The key ques- that could add value to the
tion is: can this product be utilized for customer?
another purpose that could add value
to the customer?
Attribute Dependency
What if you could add or remove dependencies between variables in and around your
product? For example, turning on a light is usually dependent on someone flipping the
light switch. If you were a light switch manufacturer and wanted to improve your prod-
uct, perhaps removing that dependency would be a good place to start. That seems
to be the idea behind motion sensing light switches. In many commercial buildings
these products have been used to save time and energy. Conversely, in some cases
it may be beneficial to create new dependencies in a product. The oft sited example
of this is transition lenses. Before transition lenses if the sun’s brightness changed
you would need to remove your glasses and put on sunglasses. There was no linkage
between the variables that mattered to the performance of the glasses. With transition
lenses these variables were linked (a new dependency was added) and the glasses
performance responded accordingly.

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7. SCAMPER
By Alex Osborn, Original Creator of Brainstorming
SCAMPER is an acronym for a list of thought provoking tools to help facilitate ideation
and innovation development. The components of SCAMPER are:
Substitute (e.g. components, materials, people, etc.)

Think through the product and the various components, materials and people (among
other items) who use the product. Now think of substituting some of those with differ-
ent things. For example, if you were coming up with a new idea for a smartphone one
of the ways you could utilize this principle is to identify the components of the phone
and start brainstorming substitutes. One major component on the phone is the case.
What if you substituted the plastic case with an all metal case (like HTC did with a re-
cent aluminum phone). Or what if you substituted the case with wood (like Motorola X
phone is capable of). Or what if you used granite for the case? That hasn’t been done
before to my knowledge. The same could be said for customers. What if our custom-
ers were all senior citizens instead of young, tech-savvy individuals? The idea of cre-
ating a smartphone just for senior citizens can prompt more ideas regarding the hard-
ware and software to use.
Combine
What other components, services, items, etc. could I combine or integrate with this
product? Keeping with the smartphone example, what if you could combine a smart-
phone with a tablet by having the phone dock into the tablet (like Asus has done with
the Padphone). What if you could combine additional services such as internet radio
subscriptions with each smartphone sold and have the billing bundled together? An-
other idea would be to combine the functionality of a smartphone with the functional-
ity of an image projector. Or if you wanted to get really crazy, why not combine the
functionality of a smartphone with an umbrella? Could you build an umbrella into a
smartphone? Well...that might not be a very good idea after all but you get the point.
Adapt
How could the product adapt to meet different uses, scenarios, or conditions? For

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example, how might tires adapt for use in the snow? Answer: studded tires. In keep-
ing with the smartphone example, how might a smartphone adapt if it were to be
used in places where there are no electricity or cell towers? Add satellite functional-
ity perhaps? Due to the lack of power it would also need built in solar charging or fuel
cell power of some kind. The point of the adapt part of SCAMPER is to help you think
through various scenarios which can prompt unique and interesting ideas. This works
with any product or service.
Magnify/Modify
What if you made an extremely large version of the product (Magnify)? When the iPad
first came out there was a funny picture that circled the internet which showed a guy
who had taped a magnifying glass to his face while he was using his iPhone. The
caption read “The New iPad.” The picture has some truth to it. Though development
for the iPad technically started before development of the iPhone (the iPhone’s touch-
screen came from that work), after the iPhone came out the easiest development
route for the iPad was to simply enlarge some key components such as the screen
and battery. Other ways to apply this principle include asking yourself things such as
what other ways could this product be modified? What other meaning, color, motion,
sound, smell, form or shape could it embody? Would any of these new embodiment
add value to the consumer?
Put to Other Uses

This principle is similar to the idea of task unification in SIT. What other uses does your
product have that have not been explored yet? What other services could you provide
with your current business model (or idea of a business model)? For example, I used
to work in the home security industry and while I worked there I often thought about
the idea of monitoring and real-time reporting. In a nutshell that is what we were pro-
viding homeowners - the monitoring and real-time reporting of their home so it can be
properly protected from intrusion, fire, etc. But I often thought that it might be valuable
to monitor other things as well. What if people wanted to monitor the energy con-
sumption in their home? Or what about monitoring and real-time reporting of the types
of television shown in their home - especially useful for kids who you wouldn’t want
exposed to bad TV? Most of the time this is done with software solutions but what if
you wanted fewer “false alarms” and were willing to enable a monitoring service man-
aged by humans (like home security) who would verify alarms and send the proper

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notifications? I suspect for most people this would constitute major privacy concerns
but it’s another example of how you could put to other uses the idea of home security.
Eliminate
Leonardo Da Vinci wrote “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” The principle of
eliminate tends to help innovators steer towards a more simple and refined approach
to their product. Too often with new product development programs it becomes re-
ally easy to get caught up in the trap of over-designing something. Adding too many
features and making the product way too complicated for end users to use. Con-
versely, simply by thinking through things to eliminate you can come up with new
ideas and embodiments that might make sense. Removing the hardware keyboard
on a smartphone when the iPhone came out is a key example of this. One key point
of this idea is that you must think through eliminating things that are normally thought
of as essential to the product’s design and functionality and then come up with solu-
tions of how to deal with those situations. Another example is the number of buttons
on a device. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s it seemed that devices were designed with
as many buttons as possible. The more the better. In the mid 2000’s though, some-
thing happened. People started shunning the buttons and wishing for more simplicity.
Around this time BMW came up with what they called the iDrive - a joystick and but-
ton to control your entire car. Initially reviews were mixed because it took some getting
used to but as time went on the system gained popularity and now the system makes
use of voice controls - further reducing the need for even iDrive itself. Perhaps one
day there wont need to be any buttons in a car because the car would drive itself and
you could use voice commands to make it do certain things.
Reverse/Rearrange
This is one of the more quirky and interesting tools in SCAMPER. Think of what you
would do if the product was used in reverse? Think again about a car. What if the
vehicle was only driven in reverse? Well driving with your neck cranked all the way
around the entire time would get old and painful after a while. In that scenario, it would
be much better if there was a display of what’s in the rear of the car built into the
dash. That’s just one idea. Another thought is that it would be nice if the rear wheels
turned in addition to the front wheels. Four-wheel turning is now available on some
luxury cars and we all know how rear displays are becoming ubiquitous on newer
cars. These are just some of the ways to use this method. Another interesting example

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is that of an upright stapler. I don’t know why it took so long for someone to think of
it but normal staplers take up plenty of space on a desk compared to the upright ver-
sions. Perhaps the inventor came up with the idea using the SCAMPER method.
8. The Innovators DNA

By Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen
The Innovators DNA is less a process or set of brainstorming tools and more of a set
of common characteristics all successful innovators have. Even though this framework
doesn’t provide specific tools for generating ideas, the principles are vitally important
to successful innovation management. The authors of The Innovators DNA began their
research by seeking to answer the following two questions: “How do I find innova-
tive people for my organization?” and “How can I become more innovative myself?”
These two questions spawned a ten-year study which involved surveying over 7000
executives and innovators as well as hundreds of interviews. The results concluded
that successful innovators each have five important characteristics that enable them
to consistently innovate. These five characteristics also provide a useful litmus test for
how effectively one is approaching innovation. The five characteristics are:
Associating
This is the ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas in ways that can combine into
a new and useful concept. This skill is what Steve Jobs had an abundance of and is
essentially the same principle of “Connecting the Dots” which we discussed earlier.
The skill of associating things is most pronounced in creative people. As Steve Jobs
once said “Creativity is connecting things,” the essence of creativity is simply making
new and unique combinations of things that already exist. There are two keys to build-
ing the skill of associating:
99Have Many and Varied Experiences - Having many and varied experiences is
like filling your mind with creative fuel. One of the best and most efficient meth-
ods to having many and varied experiences is travel. Many entrepreneurs have
started successful companies simply by traveling somewhere and discovering
something new and useful that they could bring back to their homeland.
99Consciously Mash-up - Travel alone doesn’t make you more innovative or cre-
ative. It’s only in burning the fuel of creativity do you experience bursts of inno-

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vative thought. The most effective method I have found to burn creative fuel is
to consciously write down observations and think through possible connections.
As you do this over and over you will eventually train your mind to do it automat-
ically to the point where you won’t need to write them down and inspiration will
flow freely.
Questioning
In the study, the authors cite this great quote by Peter Drucker: “The important and
difficult job is never to find the right answers, it is to find the right question.” Success-
ful innovators have always questioned the status quo and are rarely, if ever, satisfied.
Most often what happens is the innovator will experience something that annoys or
frustrates them and begin to ask “Why? Why does this simple service require so many
steps? Why do I need to read an instruction manual to know how this works? Why
not eliminate steps and the instruction manual altogether?” These are the kinds of
questions that spawn great entrepreneurial ideas. One example the authors cite is the
founding of Dell. While attending college, Michael Dell wondered why most comput-
ers cost five times more than the sum of their parts. As he explored this question he
discovered a new opportunity to build a streamlined computer company which later
became Dell.
Observing
Observation is a skill that separates good marketers from great marketers. Some of
the most profound ideas came from the simplest observations. The founder of Intuit
started the company after observing how painstakingly difficult it was for his wife to
keep track of their family finances. Upon observing this he decided there must be a
better way and eventually created Quicken. Later on, as an interesting side note - Aar-
on Patzer, the founder of Mint.com, got his inspiration for creating Mint after becoming
frustrated by how difficult it was to use Quicken. Later Mint was acquired by Intuit and
Patzer was put in charge of product innovation for the company. Just because some-
one has already created a solution for a problem, doesn’t mean there is no more room
for innovation or a better solution to take its place.
Experimenting

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So much of successful entrepreneurship and innovation revolves around experimen-

tation. This idea has become so popular that lately an entire movement has formed
around the idea of “The Lean Startup” championed by Eric Ries. The central concept
is for innovators to release an MVP or minimum viable product to a group of users
who can provide quick feedback and help you iterate into a solution that precisely
matches the customer need. Though the lean start-up model is effective and I highly
encourage it’s implementation (I plan to write on it in the near future), experimentation
need not be limited to alpha type releases of actual products. In the broadest sense
of the word, experimentation can encompass a wide range of experiments such as
thought experiments, experiments in creating a prototype and market experiments
such as testing out how the product may be received in a market. One caution about
running experiments though - make sure to control as many variables as possible or
else you may get inaccurate results. For example, if you have an idea for a new type of
high-fashion jeans, make sure to control for the precise market your jeans may appeal
to. If the objective of the experiment is to know whether or not people will like your
new jeans, make sure to only present those jeans to people who may be in your target
market. E.g. college students. Don’t just ask your close family members if they like
your new jeans and expect them to give you feedback representative of your intended
market. Many great ideas are killed by not asking the right people about whether or
not your new idea is any good. But despite the risks, experimentation is essential to
successful innovation.
Networking
The idea of networking is well entrenched in modern business lingo. However, this
is not the kind of networking you may be thinking of where you meet people, put on
your most awesome face and hope they think you’re someone worthy of their time
(and money). Innovators don’t start networking with the intent to trade money or jobs,
rather they do it to trade ideas. In conjunction with the concept of associating and ob-
serving, innovators often try to put themselves in situations where they can meet peo-
ple who have a unique background and an interesting perspective on the problems
people face. Meeting these types of creative, inventive, thought-provoking people on
a regular basis helps free your mind from your own limited perspective and see things
in a new light. By doing this, what you’ll find is that often the answers to your industry-
specific problem will come from outside your industry. This is why many I highly en-
courage people to view or attend TED talks. These talks are a great way to expand
your knowledge domain to cover multiple viewpoints and foster new ideas.

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9. So What? Who Cares? Why You?®

By Wendy Kennedy
I recently came across this framework from Wendy Kennedy and was impressed by
the simpleness and conciseness with which you can express your shiny new idea
to others - say for an investor presentation, perhaps. Wendy Kennedy, author and
founder of WKI-wendykennedy.com, has created a methodology and platform of visu-
al tools to help innovators discover the business value of their science and technology
ideas. It’s a process used by organizations to accelerate the most promising projects
and concepts from “ideation” to commercialization.
So what? who cares? why you? is based on the key questions people ask when eval-
uating the potential of new ideas. Each question represents a step in the value discov-
ery process and is anchored by a visual tool or framework to explore, model and map
the commercial potential for a new idea. I highly recommend you check out her web-
site if you want to learn more. Below is just a short list of the questions in the process
that help entrepreneurs clearly define what their idea is, who the customer is and why
you have the right stuff to make it happen.
So What?
As every entrepreneur and innovator knows, when you have an idea you are passion-
ate about it is not always easy to explain what the idea is to others in simple terms. To
make things easier, each step is split up into three sub-questions:
99What’s Your Idea? - Think of this as the headline of a newspaper. When you
launch your great new idea, what would you want the headline say if/when :-) it
appears on the front page of the New York Times? For example, when Nest first
announced their newly created learning thermostat, the headline on TIME maga-
zine was “’Nest’” Is The iPod of Thermostats.” With just that headline you know
several things: 1) Nest is something new that’s come out, 2) it’s sexy and easy
to use like an iPod and 3) it’s a thermostat. It’s that level of simplicity and clarity
that helps sell your idea to both customers and potential investors.
99What’s the Problem? - What problem does your idea solve? To think of this,
remind yourself how you came up with the idea in the first place. Was it to an-
swer a specific challenge like “How can I upload and share my pictures with my

29
friends faster?” (Instagram). By answering this question you are identifying the
reason anyone would ever be willing to pay money for the product. If you can’t
answer this question effectively, then you may need a new idea.
99Where does your idea fit? - This question relates to where does your idea fit in
the market of similar items. Would this be a premium product, a value product or
somewhere in the mid-tier? This relates well with my strategy framework of cost
vs benefit leadership. Would this be an idea that lends itself more towards cost
leadership or benefit leadership? Answering this question is key to knowing how
your idea will fit in when you take it to market.
Who Cares?
For every new idea, this is arguably the most important question to answer. Who, if
anyone, will care about your idea? A common mistake people make after coming up
with a new idea is asking their family members what they think about it. Many times
the response is less than encouraging, not because the idea is wrong but because
those family members are not part of the intended market. The idea could be fantastic
if it reached the right people but if it doesn’t get outside your immediate circle of fam-
ily/friends, it may not be well received. There are three questions as a part of this main
section:
99Who’s Your Customer? What specific people or group of people will want to
use this product? Too often budding entrepreneurs and marketers get caught
in the “everybody” trap. Occasionally when I work with others around market-
ing messaging and new product innovation we’ll come up with an idea and this
question will come up. Some will answer by saying “everybody is going to want
this!” Or “Everyone is our target market!” Wrong. There is zero chance that actu-
ally “everybody” will want some one thing. For example, let’s pretend we work
for a toaster company and we came up with a new, faster and safer way of mak-
ing toast. Who is going to want this thing? Well, “everybody!” some will say. “Ev-
eryone eats toast, right?!” No. Not everyone eats toast. And not even everyone
who eats toast actually makes toast. And not even everyone who makes toast
uses a toaster. Does a 4 year old kid eat toast? Yes but he or she doesn’t make
toast, the parent makes the toast. So how do we go about figuring out who
will want this new toaster? The answer is to start with someone you know - an
actual person with a name. If you can’t think of someone you know personally
who would potentially want the product idea, go online and search forums for

30
people who deal with the issue and there’s a good chance you’ll find someone
who wants what you’ve come up with. Once you’ve identified at least one actual
person who you think would want this, then you can start making more general
assumptions. Start specific then go general. Never the other way around.
99What’s Your Path To Market? - This question is critical to understanding ex-

actly how you plan to reach your customers. If you’ve already answered the
question of who your customer is, now it’s time to answer how you plan to reach
them. Is it online? Is it through TV or infomercials? Is it door-to-door? Through a
wholesaler or retailer? Through a dealer network? Through a third-party licens-
ing deal? Even once you’ve answered those questions you’ll still need to identify
more specifically who or what will help you bring your idea to the marketplace.
If you’ve decided that going through a retailer is your best bet, what specific
retailer are you thinking of? How do you plan to reach the retailer? Do you know
someone who works there or has a relationship with them already? All of these
questions are critical to understanding exactly how your business will gain the
exposure it needs in order to succeed.
99Where’s The Money? - It’s surprising how many entrepreneurs will start a busi-
ness with no initial idea of how it will actually make money. Don’t let that be you.
Figure out exactly how you plan to generate revenues and have a specific plan
for how you plan to create and grow your business’ revenue streams. If it’s an
online business, do you plan to generate ad revenues? Course revenues? Ebook
revenues? Etc. If you have a new service idea, will you charge your customers
monthly for access to the service or will you charge them for every time service
is rendered? Are there multiple streams of income possibilities for your idea?
If so, what are they and how will you build them into your business model? As
the primary investor in your idea - even if you’re not investing money, you’re still
investing time - you should have a good idea of how you plan to get a return on
that investment.
Why You?
This set of questions revolves around answering questions designed to help you clari-
fy exactly why your idea has advantages over others, why you have the right team and
resources in place to make it happen and why you are the uniquely suited to create
and succeed in this new venture.

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99What’s Your Competitive Edge? - Your business needs to be uniquely valuable

to people. Notice that I used both the words unique and valuable. Valuable alone
is not enough. Assuming you’ve already identified that your idea is capable of
providing value to people, let’s talk about the uniqueness of your idea. What
specific reasons should your customers buy your product (or use your service)
over all the other alternatives they can choose from? You might say they don’t
have any alternatives to choose from but that’s false. People always have alter-
natives they can choose from. You might say but this is absolutely the first and
only product of its kind in the world. That could be true but it doesn’t mean peo-
ple don’t have alternatives to choose from. For example, let’s say you built the
world’s first backpack-sized jet pack that is safe to use for anyone - even kids.
And it is for sure the first one in the world. From a consumer’s standing point
they don’t see it as “Wow, I need a jetpack and this is the only one available in
the world!” Rather they see it more as “I need a way to get to from point A to
point B each day and I need to purchase the right thing to help me do it.” In this
scenario the customer has many options - car, bike, run, public transportation,
jet pack, etc. So even though your idea may be new, it is definitely not the only
option your customer has. So the point of this is know what your competition is
(e.g. for jetpacks it’s airplanes, bikes, cars, etc.) and know how your option pro-
vides a uniquely valuable experience over the other alternatives. For example,
the jetpack is more fun than flying, faster than driving a car and makes you look
way more awesome than riding a bike does. Those are the competitive advan-
tages.
99Who’s On The Team? - Who are the people that make up the business? Are
they the right people? If so, why? What role will each person perform in creat-
ing the business? How will they make decisions when there is a disagreement?
What are the skills of each team member and how do they complement each
other?
99What’s Your Story? - What story in your life helps illustrate how you are per-
fectly suited to create this solution? What experiences did you have in coming
up with the idea? Have you overcome the problem yourself in a meaningful and
repeatable way? What makes you fit for entrepreneurship? The better story you
have to tell the market, the more your potential customers will give you cred-
ibility. If all you’ve done is read a book about how to do something and you now
expect others to believe you are an expert, you’ll face an uphill climb. However,
if you have dealt with the same problem as your customers and overcome it in a

32
unique and repeatable way, you’ll have instant credibility.

I hope these set of questions are as helpful for you as they have been for me. I think
Wendy Kennedy has done a great job simplifying the complexity around creating a
new business or a new product and the insight received while going through this pro-
cess is evidence of that.
10. Human Centered Design

By IDEO
Human Centered Design (some call it User Centered Design) has been a popular and
growing method of innovation for decades and it’s been adapted and modified fre-
quently by various innovation experts. For purposes of this writing I’m going to focus
on IDEO’s interpretation of Human Centered Design, or HCD, because from what I’ve
found, they seem to have the most comprehensive viewpoint of it and they’ve devel-
oped enough guidebooks on it to fill volumes. I highly recommend IDEO’s work and if
you want to learn more about this method, visit their website here and download their
free toolkit which contains much more detail that I will cover in thie ebook. The ba-
sic premise of HCD is that humans, or the user, is at the center of the design process
rather than technology and engineering. And in HCD the design encompasses the
entirety of the users experience from beginning to end. Though there are many inter-
mediate steps, the process of Human Centered Design follows this basic outline:
Hear
During the “hear” phase you will do a deep dive into researching the people who you
want to solve a problem for. You’ll decide who to study, observe them while they ex-
perience the problem they face and see how they currently deal with that problem.
Then, ideally, you will start to gain empathy for them and their situation and you’ll
capture their experiences as stories. This experience of immersing yourself into your
potential customer’s world will inform your innovation efforts throughout the process.
During the hear phase, there are several steps to help you capture your customer’s
needs:
99Identify A Problem To Investigate (The Design Challenge) - The first step is to
have a customer problem in mind that you want to investigate and understand
better. For example, if you want to create a new product to help people preserve
and store food more efficiently, you should establish that as the goal of the study

33
from the beginning.
99Write Down Existing Knowledge About The Problem - Chances are that you
already know a thing or two about the problem you want to study. Document
what you already know about the problem and identify gaps in your own knowl-
edge about the problem so you know what to focus on when going through the
observation phase.
99Identify People To Speak With - When figuring out who to talk to about the
problem you identify, it’s often most helpful to speak with those people who are
at the extremes of the issue. It’s always good to get a range but if you can get
the extremes as well, they will usually be most vocal about the specifics of the
problem and how they dealt with it.
99Choose Research Methods - There are a variety of tools you can use when
engaging with your potential customers. Among these are:
• Individual interviews
• Focus group
• In context immersion (becoming the customer)
• Ethnography (in-depth observation of the customer and their experience)
• Expert interviews
99Develop An Interview Approach - Just setting up an interview without knowing
how to approach the topic is a recipe for useless data. Use these basic interview
principles to get the responses you need:
99Open Specific - Help your participant get used to the process by asking specif-
ic questions they can easily answer such as their name, age, favorite color, hob-
bies, or anything specifically related to the problem such as how they currently
solve it, etc.
99Go Broad - After the person or group is warmed up, ask them general questions
that will elicit broad responses. In this stage you want to ask things like what
their goals are and how they view the issue from a grand scale. For example, if
I were creating a new smartphone I might want to ask a broad question such as
“How do you communicate with others? What are some right and wrong ways
to communicate with other people?” Their responses will be broadly applicable
to the problem you’re trying to solve and will provide you with the context they
experience.

34
99Probe Deep - Start to dive into the specifics of what they experience. In the
smartphone example, ask probing questions that help them elicit specific re-
sponses and provide detailed examples. These responses will be incredibly use-
ful to you later on in the design process.
99Develop Your Mindset - Make sure you have cultivated a healthy perspective be-
fore going into this research phase. Avoid approaching these interviews as fish-
ing for specific answers to validate your previous assumptions. Rather cultivate
what Steve Jobs referred to as a “Beginners Mind” and be ready to absorb data
like a sponge.
Create
The create phase is where you summarize the research you’ve done, brainstorm pos-
sible solutions and begin creating simple and quick prototypes.
99Create User Personas - During your research you should have come across a
variety of potential customers. As you think about each potential user you met
and interacted with (or learned about), try to group each user into categories.
For each category develop a user persona that typifies that category of users.
Most marketers think of these categories of users as market segments. Use
these customer personas, which represent a market segment, to guide you
as you begin to clarify the problem they face and generate potential solutions
to that problem. Give each persona a name and a face (they need not be real
names and the faces can be stand-ins) to make it easier to relate to them and
their needs.
99Share Stories - One of the most effective ways to understanding your custom-
er’s pain points is to write out specific stories that exemplify the problem they
face. For simplicity you can use the personas created in the step above as a
starting point for your stories. Pick a persona and then write out the story of that
person with regards to the particular problem you are trying to solve. List the
steps they took to arriving at the problem and then list the pain they experienced
when they applied the current solutions to that problem. Write these out as a
narrative of the persona as if they are a character in a novel that experiences
something that bothers them, leads them to wasting time or money or causes
them grief in some way. Don’t write the solution to the problem yet but be very
specific about the issues your persona faced. And if one of your research partic-

35
ipants had an experience that would typify a large segment of users, write their
story verbatim. The more specific and the more vivid, the more useful the story
will be later on when coming up with solutions.
99Identify Patterns - As you develop personas and user stories, patterns will of-
ten emerge. Identify these patterns and document them as key insights into your
potential customers experience. Look for the following types of patterns from
your research:
• Processes - Identify and document the overall, end-to-end process the user
experienced. Use a process diagram to help guide your thinking. Identify
steps such as how the user came to know they needed a solution, how the
current solutions presented themselves and how they set about implement-
ing those solutions. The overall customer purchase process is the most
obvious way to approach documenting this process.
• Cycle - Look for cycles that occur throughout the process and determine
how often the process is repeated and whether or not the entire process is
better represented as a cycle.
• Hierarchies - Look for ways the user prioritized things throughout their ex-
perience. List how they prioritized their decision making and identify how
those priorities influenced their overall satisfaction of meeting their needs.
• Matrix - Create tables or matrices to help clarify some of the choices the
user had to make throughout the process.
• Relationships - Use Venn diagrams to identify any key overlapping relation-
ships in your research and to clarify alternative choices the user could have
made.
99Identify Opportunities - After synthesizing the research above into well-docu-
mented personas, stories and patterns you are now equipped to identify specific
areas of opportunity. This step is essential because it helps focus your brain-
storming efforts toward solving a specific set of problems that your customer
faces and helps clarify your users context and environment which will help en-
sure that you don’t come up with solutions that are impractical when consider-
ing the users environment at the time of need. Identify these opportunities by
asking the following questions:
• Are there steps in the process that take an inordinate amount of time? Can
we improve that time with a new solution?
• What are the highest priority items that the user is unsatisfied with?
• Etc.

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99Brainstorm New Solutions - You’re now ready to begin the brainstorming ses-
sions. If brainstorming ideas as a group, try to follow the “Seven Brainstorming
Rules:”
• Defer Judgement - There are no bad ideas during the session.
• Encourage Wild Ideas - No matter how impractical they may seem.
• Build On The Ideas of Others - Use the term “and” instead of “but.” “And”
is a building block for ideas, “but” is a wrecking ball.
• Stay Focused On Topic - Be disciplined and focus on solving the problem
at hand.
• Be Visual - Try to engage both the creative and logical side of the brain.
• One Conversation At A Time - Allow everyone’s ideas to be heard.
• Go for Quantity - Worry about quality later, right now is a time to air a multi-
tude of thoughts that can be built upon. Filtering happens later on.
99Make Ideas Real - After you’ve come up with a set of ideas, now it’s time for
early prototyping. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you need to actually create a
finished and fully operational prototype but you should have enough information
to create a quick and rough prototype - even if that means just a diagram or a
drawing. Use whatever tools you have available and build a rapid prototype that
you can show to someone. A sketch on the back of a napkin is the most famous
example of a rapid prototype. Use cardboard, string, tape, a whiteboard, what-
ever to make your idea one step closer to reality.
99Gather Feedback - Iteration and quick, validated learning is one of the most
important aspects of successful innovation. After you’ve created your rough
and rapid prototype, show it to people who are part of your list of potential cus-
tomers. Ask for their feedback on what they think of it and how it could be im-
proved. When gathering feedback, remember these key principles:
• Don’t Sell the Idea - You’re goal is not to make a sale but to improve your
idea.
• Ask Participants To Build On The Idea - Incorporate any ideas they have
into the prototype to improve the overall quality of the idea.
Deliver
After understanding the customer’s needs, identifying opportunities and creating rapid
prototypes, you are now ready to start creating the solution. However, keep in mind
that throughout this phase you will still be learning and iterating as you go because for

37
each prototype you’ll receive feedback and be able to incorporate that feedback into
the next iteration until the solution is practically bullet proof.
99Develop A Sustainable Revenue Model - For any new product or business to
survive, it must be able to generate revenue in a sustainable way. In this step
you must do the following:
• Know the value of the solution to the customer. What is the maximum they
would be willing to pay for this?
• Know what the sources of revenue will be. Will customers pay, sponsors,
advertisers, retailers, wholesalers, etc?
• Identify how the solution benefits each stakeholder.
99Identify Capabilities Required To Deliver Solution - Most products require a
team of people with various skill sets and abilities in order to deliver the finished
product. In this step you must think through the entire value chain and identify
exactly what skills will be needed in order to deliver each step. For example:
• How will you distribute your solution - when, where and how do you expect
your customers to experience your solution?
• What engineering, financial, manufacturing, marketing and sales skills will
be required in order for this solution to be created and executed reasonably
well?
• Who should you partner with in order to deliver the solution and comple-
ment your skills?
99Plan A Pipeline of Solutions - To survive and thrive as a business, you must
have a plan for the future. Create a pipeline of solutions that you will deliver over
time as you gain momentum and better understanding of your customers needs.
99Create An Implementation Timeline

• Short-term (1 year or less) timeline - use a Gantt chart or similar format for
this in order to keep your efforts on schedule and ensure timely delivery of
your solution.
• Long-term (5 years or more) timeline - use a marketing road map where you
lay out your pipeline of solutions or features that you plan to implement over
the next five years.
Conclusion

38
Human Centered Design has been around for decades but no one knows how to do it
better than IDEO. If you want to learn more, I suggest visiting their website and down-
loading some of their free white papers on HCD.
Conclusion to the ebook

If you’ve gotten this far into the ebook, congratulations! You have just read a summary
of 10 of the most powerful innovation methods currently available. These methods will
help you no matter what your goal with regards to innovation and creativity. This list
is not the end however as there are many more innovative methods that I didn’t even
touch on yet such as The Lean Startup, the Business Model Canvas, etc. I plan to ad-
dress each of those methods on my blog.
Thanks again for downloading this book and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I en-
joyed making it!
Jake Nielson


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10 PROVEN METHODS

This ebook is dedicated to my family for all the support and

The information contained in this guide is for informational purposes only.

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

1. Theory of Disruptive Innovation................................................ 5

2. Outcome Driven Innovation AKA “Jobs To Be Done”............. 8

3. Connecting The Dots................................................................. 9

5. Blue Ocean Strategy................................................................ 15

6. Systematic Inventive Thinking................................................ 19

8. The Innovators DNA ................................................................ 24

9. So What? Who Cares? Why You?® ......................................... 26

10. Human Centered Design ...................................................... 31

Conclusion to the ebook.............................................................. 36

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

1. Theory of Disruptive Innovation

Customers Can Only Use So Many Features

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

99The product is too expensive

Disruptive Innovation Model

Overserved Customers = Disruptive Opportunity

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

Disrupt Your Own Products Before A Competitor Does

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

2. Outcome Driven Innovation AKA

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

content I care about and to help

3. Connecting The Dots

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

Connecting Experience Dots Matrix

“When you ask a creative person how they did some-

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

One thing to note before we move on is

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

the intersection of those two terms.

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

New (Sometimes Random) Spaces

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

5. Blue Ocean Strategy

Smartphone Strategy Canvas

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

What attributes would you “raise” with your product or service?

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

is because new startups don’t have

By allowing customers to customize their phone’s colors according to their specific

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

6. Systematic Inventive Thinking

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

Substitute (e.g. components, materials, people, etc.)

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

Put to Other Uses

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

8. The Innovators DNA

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

So much of successful entrepreneurship and innovation revolves around experimen-

10 Proven Methods To Innovate Your Way to Success by Jacob Nielson

9. So What? Who Cares? Why You?®