The key to real innovation is in observing and identifying problems worth solving. Unfortunately many innovators are driven by the teaching that commitment and persistence will lead to success, even with ideas and products that may have little merit, writes Roger La Salle.
Persist and you will succeed, we are told. But how true is this? Does persistence really win in the end? I have always lived by a saying I coined many years ago:
“Persistence is an important element of success; Persistence is an essential element of failure.”
The underlying thinking here is that if the idea is fundamentally bad, no amount of persistence will make it good. Worse still, many are so enamoured with their ideas that they invest heavily in patents only to then fail and go broke at the same time.
Persistence needs to be moderated with a high degree of common sense and objectivity, and the ability to let go and know when to stop. It’s not a failure if you stop before it’s too late. It is a failure if you persist beyond the point of sensibility. Having said that, capturing and holding the nub of a good idea is another matter as maybe it’s just a matter of time until the technology is achievable. A good example may be the concept of a wristwatch phone – conceived 50 years ago and a marvellous idea, but only recently possible.
With that in mind let us explore the ways we can identify ideas or problems worth solving in the first place, before applying the tools of innovation and engineering to find a solution.
Quite remarkably, the suggestion that you should explore your customers’ needs in search of a problem is somewhat new in the pursuit of innovation. This simple notion –of asking what the customer wants – is embodied in so-called “Design Thinking”, a movement that only swept the world during the past decade.
The idea of exploring customer needs is of course excellent; the problem is that the means of exploring such needs was lacking.
The secret to identifying possible good ideas lies in the art of not asking, but observing people’s behaviour. This is best done using the tools of “Opportunity Capture”, where there are only five things one needs to observe:
- Predictable activities.
- Widespread activities.
- Repetitious activities.
- Emerging trends in activities.
- Comparison between groups.
These are the seeds of opportunity capture, with the entire opportunity scan process being embedded in a five-by-eight matrix that gives some 40 ways to explore the opportunity horizon. However, the above seeds alone will suffice if we just use these to observe behaviour. Properly used, the approach of observation makes it easy to identify opportunities for innovation – in fact, disruptive innovation, since it focuses on common behaviours.
This brings to mind a problem we observed many years ago, but have only recently resolved and brought to market. To put this into context, fires in electrical switchboards almost always occur at terminations as joints become loose and corrode and resistance rises, resulting in thermal runaway or hot spots.
For years the approach to identifying hot spots has included all of the ingredients that may qualify for an opportunity scan. Activities that were predictable, widespread and repetitious, with thermographers virtually worldwide annually taking single-shot thermal images inside electrical switchboards in an endeavour to find hot spots.
Unfortunately, as good as this may sound, a thermography can never be sure that when the picture is taken the load actually causing the hot spot is even operating. Who really knows what’s happening when the thermal image is captured?
In fact the suggestion that a one-shot thermal picture of an electrical switchboard, with unknown loads operating, can give you peace of mind that a building is safe from fire until the next annual picture is questionable.
Alternatives such as real-time radio I0T alert devices are available. So too are fibre-optic monitors that span many connections, or fixed thermal cameras or wired thermocouples, but these are simply not cost-effective for use across the myriad of switchboards and wires that populate every building in the country.
It was the opportunity scan and observation of hot spots and the sheer population of switchboards that resulted in the development of a newly released technology.
Costing only a few cents each, permanent colour change clips that change colour from purple to bright pink are now available and can be attached to every cable to indicate the presence of a hot spot, no matter when it occurred. Faults are now obvious the moment you open the switchboard.
This is one simple example of what an opportunity scan can achieve on just one level. How many other safety-related events do we see only periodically monitored that could be monitored in a more thorough fashion and thus lead to breakthrough innovations? Examples might include:
- “Tag testing” of trade power tools, only for the tool to become damaged and dangerous the very day after is passes all tests.
- Vehicle tyre pressure.
- Smoke detectors.
- Life jackets in boats.
- Electrical appliance connections.
- Gas leaks.
- CO monitors for domestic heaters.
- Water leaks and dripping taps.
The list is endless if we simply employ this opportunity scan approach of observing the way people work. Indeed, safety-related activities are a most fertile ground for identifying problems worth solving.