What must I do to be Successfully Innovative

Recently one of my Business Associates, Marcia Potts, sent me this brief question on Facebook:

Coach, what to do to be innovative and creative in order to earn some of this kind of doe (Like Apple recent record sales)? I am hoping to have some...even if it is 0.50%.

After some thought I responded as follows:

Hi Marcia, I agree with your wishes. The challenge is (1) To see the immediate future, (2) Understand your customers hopes and aspirations in this new future and (3) Be willing to take calculated risks in helping them achieve their dreams.

A brief question and a brief Facebook answer. But not so easy to do!

To really see the immediate future is to be constantly scanning your particular industry and associated industries and capturing the immediate trends. This is more of an art, a skill really, to differentiate what are just fads from what are truly trends. This is not analysis but synthesis, not breaking down and analyzing information and data but being able to pick up the varying clues and snippets of information and joining them to make a judgement or intuition. I believe Steve Jobs and Apple understood the shift away from desk-work to mobile social communication coupled with entertainment and its implications before most of us.

Then to understand your customers' hopes and dreams in this new evolving environment is not so much asking them through focus groups and questionnaires but in anticipating their aspirations even before they have them. In a sense it is knowing them better than they know themselves. Again the Apple Team understood the evolving dream to be able to easily create and consume personal multimedia content while on the go. This also is not analysis but insight through brainstorming.

And then the final step, to be willing to take calculated risks in helping them achieve their dreams. Apple did this by creating the new MacBooks with iLearn software, combined this with the iPod, iPhone and then iPad. Here again the genius is in the design. As Disney another mega successful creator says in their Process...First Dream and then Dare.

If you are interested in growing your business through Innovation send me an email at coachbengo@gmail.com and I'll be happy to visit you and chat on the possibilities.