This post was inspired by a direct question for me on Quora. Over a year ago, I was asked a similar question.

Question: “How do successful companies manage the influx of ideas and choose top-notch ideas for inventing new products?“

The answer “forced” us to build the first Neuro Innovation Management Software, BlueCallom! We realized it will be the end of brainstorming.

Hubble-Telescope Credit: Nasa

A loaded question. Almost like “how do we deal with the size of the universe and select where we want to do research?” We had amazing telescopes – but thinking outside the planet earth and building Hubble was a major breakthrough in many ways.

Answer: The influx of ideas and its selection.

Who says we have to make a selection? Think Hubble – look from the outside. We have to realize that all disruptive businesses we come across were built from pieces of ideas. If we select only a few – it will probably never survive just because we limit ourselves. More detailed questions needed to be answered:

Do we really know how to create a disruptive idea?

Once I realized that I couldn’t answer the following question: “How do you determine if there is an innovation at the end of the process?” we ended up building a Hubble for Innovation. We needed to leave the comfortable sessions, talking about thinking outside the box, thinking big, bold, open blah blah blah… and find our Hubble – Neuroscience.

The pictures we saw were more than spectacular!

We took the ideation process even further and deeper and stimulated an avalanche of idea pieces. In one project, we worked with 25 executives of a large airline, producing 25 x 30+ idea pieces = 750 idea pieces in one process (2 weeks of Neuro Ideation). Since we wanted to assess all ideas and use as many as we could, we ended up needing the computer and a few algorithms to help sort and rank it. Another project consisted of 600 managers from a large pharmaceutical company. We estimated that we aggregated roughly 18,000 idea pieces, of which we also want to take as many as we could. We had to admit, neither our idea collection mechanism nor our algorithm would be good enough for that task; so we decided to build a “machine” (software) to run the show.

Building “OUR” Innovation Hubble

There is no way I can describe all our insights from Neuroscience. However, our core discovery was: “Every idea ever created by a human being, was composed of past experiences.” Meaning we can’t “create any genuinely new idea.” In other words, hoping for ideas to compete in the innovation race is like dancing around a fireplace and hoping for rain. But that is what innovation labs do today.
The day we began to question all that, was the day we realized that innovation could be a logical, manageable and highly success-oriented process.

We’re almost there – currently beta testing. First, “self experiences” almost killed us, putting our own long-term vision on its head. It was even beyond our own expectations.

Neuro Innovation Management and the end of Brainstorming

1) No more limitations – The end of Brainstorming

Don’t limit your golden nuggets (ideas) because we all have been conditioned to a process called “Brainstorming.” While brainstorming was a great start, it never created groundbreaking innovation, and today we know why. Get your team from Brainstorming, yellow Post-Its, and whiteboards to a deep dive into Neuro Ideation. The depth of your ideas will be as different as the depth of the view from Hubble. Instead of ending a brainstorming session with a few “best ideas” leverage them all. Instead of making brainstorming the core of your ideation process, give your brain time to take a deep dive into past experiences, and come up with far more relevant concepts. Neuro Ideation is a two to three-week process and requires a needs and dreams analysis with your market to be prepared. The results will be stunning no matter how creative you may think you are.

2) Tools for things we can’t handle

Remember that we all built tools to overcome our physical limitations. So we need to build amazing tools to extend the limits of our idea process. It brings a truckload of valuable idea pieces. And when we think in that direction, it opens up a whole universe of innovation relevant aspects. We call it Deep Innovation Design.

3) Never forget the innovation purpose

You need to ask yourself some of the old questions: “What problem do you want to solve? Who do you want to innovate for? What value will you provide? 100% of the answers to those questions come from our customers. With Neuro Innovation Management, we can stimulate groundbreaking Innovation on Demand. Our “Innovation Hubble” already showed us pictures that we couldn’t imagine seeing before. We eventually realized that we have to start every innovation project with an “Innovation Opportunity Discovery” project.

P.S.
We feel like Pythagoras when he explained that earth is no disk – when we say “Innovation management is no serendipity,” declaring the end of brainstorming and the beginning of a logical, manageable innovation process.

I hope it gives you some inspiration.

The post The End of Brainstorming – Beginning of a New Era appeared first on BlueCallom.

1) RESEARCH TRAP

Having trouble analyzing your market to discover real innovation opportunities or risks to get disrupted?

STATUS QUO
Today we ask questions hoping to hear that our customers tell us what they need and how you can improve. We ask far too many questions. The results are at the very best improvements for the here and now – never innovation.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Using a methodical approach for a needs & dreams analysis leads to current and future visions. There are only two times one question. What is the best possible product for you? And in a different interview another question about their dreams. Then it’s all about the analysis of that two times one question.

2) EXPERTS TRAP

Are you still working with innovation teams that are loaded with experts and only a few market-facing minds?

STATUS QUO
The majority of innovation labs are assembled with top experts. If you add more, you get more of the same but it is impossible to get to groundbreaking innovation.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Assemble a highly diverse Innovation Dream Team with carefully selected talents – not skills. It’s all about intelligent team compositions.

3) BRAINSTORMING TRAP

Are you still using yellow post-its, whiteboards, and brainstorming as your top ideation tools?

STATUS QUO
Ideation is done in one, two, or three brainstorm meetings. But our brain is not releasing deeply rooted groundbreaking innovations. Because it is structured to work very differently.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Learn all about Neuro Ideation, how our mind composes thoughts and ideas, and how we can stimulate it to release amazing concepts in just a few weeks – yes, it isn’t just a brain dump.

4) CREATIVITY TRAP

Do you feel you are super creative only the infrastructure and organization are not up to par?

STATUS QUO
The majority of innovation center members reported that they feel they are exceptionally creative but are limited by the organization, infrastructure, or otherwise.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Review the degree of impossibility of the idea and conduct a methodical market validation. You will know in just two weeks if organization and infrastructure are the biggest limitations. In most cases, it is a natural misperception.

5) APPROVAL TRAP

Struggling with getting your executives to finance and approve disruptive innovation concepts?

STATUS QUO
In particular, the most innovative ideas fail to get attention, financial support, and approval from the executive teams.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
When learning about Neuro Ideation it becomes obvious why most disruptive ideas get initially rejected, no matter from whom. “Experience Transmission” is part of the staged Financing Method.

6) EXPERIMENTATION TRAP

Are you still believing that experimentation, pivoting, and prototyping will unfold all of a sudden a magical innovation?

STATUS QUO
The idea that experimentation, pivoting, and rapid prototyping is a preferred innovation method. Fail and fail fast to try as much as possible. If we don’t know how our mind composes ideas, it is our only way to move forward.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Build your target innovation on the needs and dreams analysis, compile the inputs, and conduct Neuro Ideation sessions, involve the management in all episodes. You will experience an unimaginable logical result that is fundable without random experimentation.

7) THE GUESSWORK TRAP

Are you still HOPING you have a great idea, HOPING your customers will like it, HOPING you get the funding, and HOPING it will be a success?

STATUS QUO
The act of innovation is largely built on hope. Even though nobody would actually admit it.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Think through the entire innovation life cycle from finding out what and where to innovate all the way to bring such innovation successfully to market. Explore the Deep Innovation Design model. You may notice that the Neuro Ideation method has a far-reaching influence on all facets of the Innovation Life Cycle.

Obviously, you can manage the “Status Quo” with a project management tool. But isn’t that making something dysfunctional even worse and you can get caught in one or more of these innovation traps? Prior to founding BlueCallom, we did that too – and despite the love and energy for innovation, the process never really excited us. We just didn’t know why.

After learning a lot about neuroscience and how ideas are composed in our minds, we created the neuro ideation method. Little did we know that Neuro Ideation is changing the entire Innovation Life Cycle and unfolds all of a sudden a logical, natural, and manageable innovation flow.

Hope it was insightful.

The post 7 Most Counter-intuitive Innovation Traps appeared first on BlueCallom.

Ingenuity – The corporate innovation teams are typically composed of brilliant minds, top-notch experts. If they can’t solve a problem, nobody can. Is that wrong? Seriously would you expect a sales manager to sit down and innovates and finds a new algorithm? Certainly not. Or maybe a financial controller who may know how to deal with algorithms, should they come up with a new way of building the next generation rocket system? Not very likely. Or?

Experimentation – It is globally understood that it takes a huge amount of creativity to come up with truly groundbreaking ideas. And since creative outcomes cannot be ordered, innovators get a great deal of freedom to experiment with all kinds of ideas and try new ones whenever something seems to make no sense. In other words, experimentation is a key in innovation design. How else?

Competing Ideas – Of course, once an idea is born and needs to hit the road to the market we need them but first, we need an idea, a prototype, and so forth, maybe approvals,  certification, and so forth. And that is expensive. Therefore the decision needs to be made that only the best, most plausible, most viable, most promising idea gets chosen. Right?

Realization – And once it is chosen we do what needs to be done to build and make the first small production batch to surprise the market. And since that is expensive. the other ideas that are too risky won’t make it. Correct?

Startup Mania – All the cases we see and hear about disruption, come from startups. Therefore we need to understand what they do, how they do, how they come up with those innovative ideas, and learn for our own innovation labs. So far no enterprise has put another out of business based on any disruptive idea. Buying or investing in startups looks like a good idea. Is it?

I’m sure you noticed that all the above is today’s normal, yet I was trying to provoke you and kind of question everything.

For more than 6 years, we ran a startup accelerator based on our experience of starting, growing, and successfully exiting companies. We also thought all the above is sort of a logical approach. But it is not. We came to the realization, that innovation and the rise of startups are loaded with counterintuitive steps and behavior.

• Innovation lab packed with experts? The worst thing that can happen.
• Experimentation? Once we understand how ideas are created, experimentations step back.
• Competing ideas? Actually guarantees that innovation is not happening.
• Parth of realization? Not even the richest enterprise can afford that path.
• Not a single startup that was acquired or invested in bringing any kind of significant innovation

The Hidden Enterprise Innovation Power

Analyzing the main differences between a startup and an enterprise (I had the pleasure to be in both 2 enterprises than 4 startups) opened my eyes but it took 30 years. Enterprises have an inherited massive advantage over startups only that they don’t use those qualities in a way that makes them truly innovative. And when we are using the term “innovative” we mean groundbreaking innovation either as product innovation, and organizational innovation, or a business model innovation – ideally all three.

Talents
Large enterprises have many extraordinary people, superbly educated, top talented, well connected. However, the skills that are needed to become a top innovator. are never captured, never developed, and maybe oftentimes too understood.

Market Access
What startups need to explore in a painful process, enterprises have on a silver plate: customers with needs and dreams. The focus on efficiency, effectiveness, employee utilization, and more clogged the single most important access to innovation-relevant information.

Ideation Power
The top talents of any trait, diverse and far-reaching experiences, high level of qualification, and intellectual capacity are resources of an enterprise that dwarf any startup on the planet. How to leverage that power is completely unknown inside the enterprise organizations and only unfolds themselves by the sheer urge to survive in the better startups.

Realization Power
Laboratories to play and experiment in the final stage of the innovation journey map are a piece of cake in any corporate innovation environment. Startups build their MVPs with the most rudimentary tools. Sound really interesting and maybe is seen as the better solution. But only to the day when enterprise leaders get the idea to make a radical and strategic shift.

Financial Power
Almost needless to say that enterprises have no problem at all financing the first steps of an inner startup. Again a huge advantage over startups – but already in the next steps when first market tests and prototypes are complex and stretch the boundaries of physics, money runs out in enterprises. This is when VCs only begin and have no problem putting hundreds of millions in their startups. Yet a new car cost billions to develop.

What is the real problem?

When we look into the enterprise versus startup discussion, we simply look in the wrong direction. Every single successful enterprise has been an equally successful startup 20, 50, or 200 years ago. And even relatively young tech startups that have successfully completed their IPO and crossed the $5Billion revenue range almost forgot what happened when they were innovative year over year.

After four years of research, we realized: Enterprises had no other chance than fail. The way an enterprise is managed is structured in a way that the operation is optimized, employees best utilized, and every aspect of sales, marketing, production, logistics, engineering finance, and so forth is woven together in a way that leaves no room for anything else. And in the past, there was nothing else. But today there is: Every innovation triggers two new innovations, which trigger two new innovations. The innovation explosion – which only now is part of the competitive advantage – is simply not part of the enterprise management Carta.

How do you use all those discoveries?

You need to turn the counterintuitive situations with your current corporate innovation environment, on its head and redesign your thinking and innovation itself:

1. Find ways to identify, develop, empower and stimulate the best available talents
2. Leverage the market access to understand the needs and dreams of their customers
3. Going far beyond brainstorming and leveraging “neuro ideation” getting to truly groundbreaking innovation
4. Again leverage the market access to validate the extreme ideas that come out of the best possible ideation
5. Trying to redesign business models based on all inputs to find their “disruptive moment”
6. Create a long term “Staged Funding” plan before a penny was burned through experimentation
7. Now build the MVP while going to market, creating “Market Born Products”
8. Once the product is stable, scaling the operation as fast as possible.

And once done you start all over – never stop innovating, never stop producing, marketing servicing, and crafting a dominating corporate innovation strategy.  Enter into the “Innovation Continuum.”

For me, finding out how innovation is actually created and making it a repeatable process was the most exciting business journey in my life.

Let me know what you think.

The post Corporate Innovation Dilemma appeared first on BlueCallom.

When we launched our first Accelerator Program, in San Francisco in April 2014, little did we know that we may end up as an innovation development organization? While we had great successes helping our startups thrive, and were named one of the top 100 most influential accelerators in the world, already one year later, in 2015, we noticed that our unique and methodical approach gave us an enormous advantage over all our competitors.  Unlike most conventional accelerators, our program was scaleable. Even though “methodical approach” didn’t sound right in a fast-evolving startup ecosystem – it is one of those counterintuitive things about disruption in general, which made the real difference. Our accelerator was in a similar way disruptive like all the four businesses we created before. After discussions with other accelerators about teaching disruption, it seemed to be equally odd. How can somebody teach disruption when each disruption is taking an entire industry onto a radically different course and nobody has seen anything like that before?

In 2016 we began to work on our first accelerator flight to create disruptive business models. We looked for the key characteristic of disruption, how can one become disruptive and how can somebody come to a disruptive business model idea. In our 2016 accelerator, we managed to get 5 out of 8 participating companies to create a disruptive business model. This was a totally unexpected success for us and our teams. When we started this program we were hoping to get 1 out of 8 to come out with a disruptive business model.

How is innovation really created?

Approximately 2 years of research and continuous observation of our own thought processes got us ever closer to understand certain mechanisms how our brain gets to ideas and how ideas are actually formed in our brain. In 2019, we began to realize that methodically guided thought processes show far better results than the random ideation and brainstorming processes. It felt a bit like the difference between randomly hitting piano keys and hitting them in a structured order. And we also realized the analogy was deeply grounded in the very mechanism of innovation. Musicians, actually do not call their process a creation but composition. And we learned that also innovation is no real creation but a composition.

However, when hitting keys, we see our hand, get haptic feedback and kind of know how we move our hands around. But we don’t really know – yet – how we trigger our roughly 86 billion neurons and trillions of synapsis. We learned that those neurons are not statically connected to each other but can dynamically “rewire” themselves. That means our 1,000 Trillions of network nodes are a masterpiece of information aggregation and dynamic association. In a nutshell: Ideas get formed based on dynamic connections of our neurons, which in turn carries information that we accumulated one way or the other from the moment we have been created as an embryo.

To build an analogy to a computer, we don’t need to know the billions of transistors in a CPU and all the connected chips and devices – all we need to know is a programing language to develop code that know where to go. Very similarly we need to know a language or method that triggers the brain’s trillions of synapse through their neural networks. With that understanding we started to model ways to create innovative and disruptive concepts with an astounding high success rate. Getting a glimpse of an understanding how the brain works was an interesting step in understanding innovation creation.

All this is just the very beginning of an amazing journey to come.

The post Progress in Innovative & Disruptive Thinking appeared first on BlueCallom.

1. Updated Growth Accelerator Program
2. New Entrepreneurs Academy
3. Partnership with World Innovations Forum

Updated Growth Accelerator Program

We added a new session INNOVATIVE THINKING based on our experience with “Disruptive Business Model Development”. It’s all about thinking out of the box, creative, big… but how do you actually shape your thinking process? In this new session, we teach you how to actually think innovatively.

Admittedly – our all online accelerator program failed in emerging countries. Hence we are back to the former and highly successful “hybrid model”, consisting of a one-week bootcamp and 10 weeks online program.

New Entrepreneurs Academy

Between fall last year and now we developed an all-new Entrepreneurs Academy program. This is thought to be a precursor to the growth accelerator. It covers the key topics of entrepreneurship, company purpose, team development without a budget, business concept & funding, and so forth.

Partnership with World Innovations Forum

The partnership with the World Innovations Forum Foundation allows us to give stipends with substantial discounts, up to 99% to attendees from emerging and developing countries. It may also allow us to provide stipends for teams in developed countries with special conditions.

The post Accelerator Open for Applications appeared first on San Francisco Accelerator.

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