The Innovator's Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth

by David Silverstein; Philip Samuel ( ; ); Neil DeCarlo

• ISBN13: 9780470406588
• ISBN10: 0470406585
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2008-10-01
• Publisher: Wiley

Summary

If you?re a business leader, a new product developer, or an inventor, The Innovator's Toolkit is one handy guide you shouldn't be without. It presents fundamental tools and concepts for innovation and includes methods and strategies for improving products and service or creating new ones. You'll master a four-step innovation methodology that takes you through problem identification, into ideal generation, to idea selection, and finally implementation. This one-of-a-kind guide presents an effective plan for achieving constant innovation for business success.

Table of Contents

Define the Opportunity

Techniques and Tools For Identifying High-Potential Innovation Projects

Technique 1

Determine the human need you're trying to fulfill

Technique 2

Give customers more of what they desire

Technique 3

Identify opportunity gaps in the marketplace

Technique 4

Observe your customers to uncover unarticulated needs

Techniques and Tools for Scoping and Focusing Innovation Projects

Technique 5

Draw a picture of your system and its parts to focus ideation

Technique 6

Looking at your opportunity through nine different lenses

Technique 7

Broaden or narrow your innovation focus

Techniques and Tools for Effectively Managing People, Projects, and Innovation ROI

Technique 8

Get key influencers involved and on your side

Technique 9

Leverage the diversity of your exploiters and explorers

Technique 10

Keep your innovation team focused and on track

Technique 11

Constantly improve your assumption-to-knowledge ratio.

Discover the Ideas

Techniques and Tools for Re ning Innovation Opportunities

Technique 12

Make sure you use all available resources

Technique 13

Scrutinize your system for innovation

Technique 14

Learn from evolution's genetic code

Technique 15

Sacrifice the sacred cows

Techniques and Tools for Leveraging Brainpower and Turbo-Charging Creativity

Technique 16

Compare existing solutions to spark new breakthroughs

Technique 17

Ask eight important questions

Technique 18

Encourage equal opportunity ideation

Technique 19

Get silly for the sake of creativity

Technique 20

Leverage current ideas to generate many ideas

Technique 21

Use an unrelated picture or word to spawn new ideas

Technique 22

Step over the roadblocks in your thinking

Techniques and Tools for Exloring All Human Knowledge and Nature

Technique 23

Guide your innovation using 40 proven principles

Technique 24

Split your innovation problem in four ways

Technique 25

Learn how substances interact with fields to form solutions

TECHNIQUE 26 Biomimicry

Seek nature's eons of experience to find answers

Techniques and Tools for Selecting the Best Ideas for Further Development and Design

Technique 27

Group and organize ideas by their natural affinities

Technique 28

Organize and shape ideas to improve their yield

Technique 29

Evaluate your solution ideas in six different ways.

Develop the Solution

Techniques and Tools for Formulating an Initial Design

Technique 30

Identify what customers want in your solution

Technique 31

Transform what customers want into the best products and services

Technique 32

Identify how the solution functions in its whole and its parts

Technique 33

Generate solution concepts by combining design alternatives

Technique 34

Pair ideal solution elements to create new design concepts

Techniques and Tools for Selecting the Very Best Design to Pursue

Technique 35

Rank design concepts against each other in pairs

Technique 36

Evaluate all your design concepts to create the invincible solution

Techniques and Tools for Optimizing and Finalizing Designs

Technique 37

Predict the performance of your new solution

Technique 38

Make your design insensitive to uncontrollable influences

TECHNIQUE 39 Design Scorecards

Develop a dashboard to track your design and its underlying processes

Technique 40

Anticipate what can go wrong with your solution before it does

Technique 41

Visualize and test your innovation through computer modeling

Technique 42

Make a fast 3D model of your solution to explore its viability.

Demonstrate the Innovation

Techniques and Tools for Evaluating How New Products/Services Perform Prior to Their Release

Technique 43

Build a fully functioning model of your new product to test and perfect it

Technique 44

Build a fully functioning model of your new service to test and perfect it

Techniques and Tools for Mapping New Product and Service Delivery Processes

Technique 45

Identify the key inputs and outputs of your processes

Technique 46

Flesh out the details of your process

Techniques and Tools for Making Sure Processes Are Optimized for Efficient and Flawless Operations

Technique 47

Make sure you know your measurements are valid

Technique 48

Configure the workspace for flow and optimization

Technique 49

Install measures to prevent human and system error

Technique 50

Analyze input and output variables to identify the critical few

Technique 51

Compare solution attributes to cull out customer preferences

Techniques and Tools for Problem Diagnosis and Improvement Prior to Commercialization

Technique 52

Monitor process performance to keep the new solution in control

Technique 53

Investigate the root causes of performance problems

Technique 54

Identify the key input-output relationships in need of attention

Technique 55

Ensure that your new solution becomes commercialized as planned.

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.