Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation
by Debra Kaye and Karen Kelly
McGraw-Hill © 2013
288 pages
Focus
Leadership & Management
Take-Aways
• The five strands of “Red Thread Thinking” can determine the difference between commercially “viable” innovations and “creative ideas” that don’t go anywhere.
• Red Thread Thinking teaches you how to “stretch, tangle and weave together” the five essential elements of “brilliant innovation,” which are:
• First, to innovate successfully, you must bring new ideas to the marketplace.
• Brainstorming may not spur creativity; rely instead on rest, exercise and meditation.
• Second, “game changing” ideas come from “understanding culture.”
• Third, develop your “associative abilities” to discern and exploit the connections among “unrelated concepts” and disparate fields.
• Fourth, make your design as simple as possible to draw people to your innovation.
• Fifth, failure is an essential and repeated step in the innovation process. Be prepared to have your ideas simply not work…and to persevere.
• Passion provides the fuel that keeps you going as you explore new areas, get stuck, try new approaches, fail and try again.
• Business and innovation don’t exist just to earn money; they can make the world better.
• The five strands of “Red Thread Thinking” can determine the difference between commercially “viable” innovations and “creative ideas” that don’t go anywhere.
• Red Thread Thinking teaches you how to “stretch, tangle and weave together” the five essential elements of “brilliant innovation,” which are:
• First, to innovate successfully, you must bring new ideas to the marketplace.
• Brainstorming may not spur creativity; rely instead on rest, exercise and meditation.
• Second, “game changing” ideas come from “understanding culture.”
• Third, develop your “associative abilities” to discern and exploit the connections among “unrelated concepts” and disparate fields.
• Fourth, make your design as simple as possible to draw people to your innovation.
• Fifth, failure is an essential and repeated step in the innovation process. Be prepared to have your ideas simply not work…and to persevere.
• Passion provides the fuel that keeps you going as you explore new areas, get stuck, try new approaches, fail and try again.
• Business and innovation don’t exist just to earn money; they can make the world better.
Rating (10 is best)
Overall: 8
Applicability: 8
Innovation: 7
Style: 7
What You Will Learn
RELEVANCE
In this summary, you will learn:r1) How to generate new ideas, 2) How to make connections among ideas, and 3) How to use “Red Thread Thinking” to innovate more easily and profitably.
Recommendation
As their subtitle indicates, innovation expert Debra Kaye and her collaborator, writer Karen Kelly, provide practical, profitable ways to connect familiar ideas with newer ones. Their “Red Thread Thinking” model consists of five “red threads” that you can follow and entwine to bring your innovative concepts to life. Though most of the early chapters will be old news to readers who are familiar with the literature of innovation, keep reading. Once they hit their stride, the authors emphasize connecting with market reality. Their guidance is more fully articulated than the counsel in many innovation books that only offer tips on how to create. getAbstract recommends this manual to wouldbe innovators, to innovation managers and to anyone looking for a primer on workable, applied creativity.
Red Thread 1: Understand Innovation
Today’s aspiring innovators have an advantage over their ancestors. “Brain research” has achieved great breakthroughs and will produce more new understanding in the coming decades. Utilize these new insights to explore how your brain works and to consider how to generate innovations. Some organizations formalize innovation by staging brainstorming sessions, but such gatherings generate few workable ideas because they approach innovation the wrong way. They are too rigid, forced and focused.
The pressure of such sessions makes it less likely that people will find the fresh connections that lead to innovative ideas. You would be better off sending your employees away to think on their own. In fact, Google and 3M do just that: they give staffers blocks of unstructured work time to pursue their own ideas. Such unfettered exploration produces worthy innovations for both firms.
Taking a break can help you devise more new and better ideas than you’ll find through active brainstorming. Your thinking is more likely to break through to fresh perspectives when you are relaxed. One way to rest is to practice meditation, which helps you stay present in the moment and observe your thoughts without judgment. Sleep also promotes innovation, provides a break and gives your brain a chance to integrate recently acquired information. And “moderate aerobic exercise” increases “innovative potential.” Change how you think about your projects. Develop positive self-talk about how likely you are to learn about innovation and improve your creativity.
Red Thread 2: Look to the Old to Create the New
Start your search for the new by mastering the old. Few innovations are “completely original.” The best ones combine existing premises in a new way. To come up with a new idea, return to steps you’ve already taken and tasks you’ve already performed. “Excavate” them with fresh vision. “Drill deeply into the existing knowledge base.” Study the documentation – reports, formal histories, and the like – that relates to the area of your innovation. Seek knowledge not articulated in words, such as market traditions or corporate legacies. Go beyond the common assumption that you already know what happened in the past.
Start with metaphors and alternative perspectives. Borrow the approach of literary scholar Franco Moretti. Rather than analyze individual texts, Moretti introduced “the idea of distant reading,” or looking at the big picture “of the literary landscape.” This broader perspective puts individual works into context and reveals that literary genres have lifespans. Literary innovation appears throughout a school or pattern of writing, rather than in the specific works of individual geniuses. Apply the frame of reference of literary investigation to writing about and knowing your field.
Observe trends to catch their “wave” strategically. Look closely – are they fads or genuine changes in human behavior? If they’re the latter, try to adapt to them for the long term. If they’re the former, adjust to them to empower profitable innovation, but be careful about your timing.
Rather than generating new ideas, build on and connect existing ideas. Find ideas by “World Mining”: Search for developments from other places that you can refit. These can be other people’s insights, products that spurred change in other fields, emerging technologies, or another company’s findings or benefits. Repurposing is at the heart of many influential innovations.
Many larger corporations that are deeply vested in research and development (R&D) have libraries full of innovations they’ve never brought to market. They are waiting for you to put this data to the right purpose. If you work for a company with such resources, the insights you seek may already be in your files. If your company doesn’t have its own R&D department, never mind: no correlation exists between how much a firm spends on research and how well it profits.
You don’t have to be an expert in various fields to borrow from them. Often, people entering a field from the outside can see fresh possibilities. Look for businesses that are doing things similar to what you would like to do or that serve a related demographic. Borrow from what they do. For example, in 1970, Bernard D. Sadow saw people in an airport trying to carry heavy suitcases; he also noticed an airport employee using a wheeled “skid” to move heavy equipment. Synthesizing these observations, Sadow had an insight that led to mounting similar wheels onto suitcases.
You can also innovate successfully by changing the market: Find something large and make it smaller or pinpoint something expensive and produce a cheaper version for another niche. You can also lift a single quality or attribute from one field and apply it to another. Steve Jobs did this when he took the aesthetic qualities of calligraphy and applied them to the Macintosh, thus revolutionizing computer design.
Red Thread 3: Watch People to Get Insights
Many people dream of discovering “game changers” – ideas that make everything different or transform how people behave. “Understanding culture” is the secret to such innovations. Observe people, consider their behavior and discern why they do what they do. Weave your innovation into their existing behaviors and motivations. Make connections among the details of what you see. These connecting insights must be new and exciting enough to carry you through the work of innovating – and to take those who use your innovation through the act of change.
Red Thread 4: Design, Marketing, Presentation and Innovation
To go to market, your idea must be recognizable as being new. It should be innately attractive and should communicate a fresh identity. To draw people to your product, make your design as simple as possible. Combine its various aspects “into a pleasing and harmonious whole” and eliminate everything extraneous. Design should fuel sales and function: the faster potential customers understand how and why your product is unique, the more likely they are to buy it. Simplify your product to reduce the number of active choices users must make. The form your simplicity should take depends on the culture of your target customers. Simplicity looks very different in Sweden than it does in Asia.
Red Thread 5: Passion Required
Recommendation
As their subtitle indicates, innovation expert Debra Kaye and her collaborator, writer Karen Kelly, provide practical, profitable ways to connect familiar ideas with newer ones. Their “Red Thread Thinking” model consists of five “red threads” that you can follow and entwine to bring your innovative concepts to life. Though most of the early chapters will be old news to readers who are familiar with the literature of innovation, keep reading. Once they hit their stride, the authors emphasize connecting with market reality. Their guidance is more fully articulated than the counsel in many innovation books that only offer tips on how to create. getAbstract recommends this manual to wouldbe innovators, to innovation managers and to anyone looking for a primer on workable, applied creativity.
Summary
“Red Thread Thinking”
Millions of people fiddle with things to make them better. But few people innovate successfully for the marketplace by applying their modifications, variations and new ideas to make money. Creativity alone is never enough. Innovation means taking an idea to the testing ground of consumer demand. The five strands of Red Thread Thinking can determine the difference between commercially “viable” innovations and “creative ideas” that don’t go anywhere.
Creativity, a necessary component of innovation, gets people’s attention. Practical innovation goes further, connecting an item’s multiple qualities to serve consumers. Useful inventions make work easier, cheaper or more effective. Innovation gets people to buy a new product and is essential for success in today’s market. The good news is that everyone can innovate, improve existing designs and transform ideas into attractive products. Red Thread Thinking offers five simple techniques that help you “weave” distinct ideas together easily, methodically and regularly to achieve successful innovation.
Creativity, a necessary component of innovation, gets people’s attention. Practical innovation goes further, connecting an item’s multiple qualities to serve consumers. Useful inventions make work easier, cheaper or more effective. Innovation gets people to buy a new product and is essential for success in today’s market. The good news is that everyone can innovate, improve existing designs and transform ideas into attractive products. Red Thread Thinking offers five simple techniques that help you “weave” distinct ideas together easily, methodically and regularly to achieve successful innovation.
Red Thread 1: Understand Innovation
Today’s aspiring innovators have an advantage over their ancestors. “Brain research” has achieved great breakthroughs and will produce more new understanding in the coming decades. Utilize these new insights to explore how your brain works and to consider how to generate innovations. Some organizations formalize innovation by staging brainstorming sessions, but such gatherings generate few workable ideas because they approach innovation the wrong way. They are too rigid, forced and focused.
The pressure of such sessions makes it less likely that people will find the fresh connections that lead to innovative ideas. You would be better off sending your employees away to think on their own. In fact, Google and 3M do just that: they give staffers blocks of unstructured work time to pursue their own ideas. Such unfettered exploration produces worthy innovations for both firms.
Taking a break can help you devise more new and better ideas than you’ll find through active brainstorming. Your thinking is more likely to break through to fresh perspectives when you are relaxed. One way to rest is to practice meditation, which helps you stay present in the moment and observe your thoughts without judgment. Sleep also promotes innovation, provides a break and gives your brain a chance to integrate recently acquired information. And “moderate aerobic exercise” increases “innovative potential.” Change how you think about your projects. Develop positive self-talk about how likely you are to learn about innovation and improve your creativity.
Red Thread 2: Look to the Old to Create the New
Start your search for the new by mastering the old. Few innovations are “completely original.” The best ones combine existing premises in a new way. To come up with a new idea, return to steps you’ve already taken and tasks you’ve already performed. “Excavate” them with fresh vision. “Drill deeply into the existing knowledge base.” Study the documentation – reports, formal histories, and the like – that relates to the area of your innovation. Seek knowledge not articulated in words, such as market traditions or corporate legacies. Go beyond the common assumption that you already know what happened in the past.
Start with metaphors and alternative perspectives. Borrow the approach of literary scholar Franco Moretti. Rather than analyze individual texts, Moretti introduced “the idea of distant reading,” or looking at the big picture “of the literary landscape.” This broader perspective puts individual works into context and reveals that literary genres have lifespans. Literary innovation appears throughout a school or pattern of writing, rather than in the specific works of individual geniuses. Apply the frame of reference of literary investigation to writing about and knowing your field.
Observe trends to catch their “wave” strategically. Look closely – are they fads or genuine changes in human behavior? If they’re the latter, try to adapt to them for the long term. If they’re the former, adjust to them to empower profitable innovation, but be careful about your timing.
Rather than generating new ideas, build on and connect existing ideas. Find ideas by “World Mining”: Search for developments from other places that you can refit. These can be other people’s insights, products that spurred change in other fields, emerging technologies, or another company’s findings or benefits. Repurposing is at the heart of many influential innovations.
Many larger corporations that are deeply vested in research and development (R&D) have libraries full of innovations they’ve never brought to market. They are waiting for you to put this data to the right purpose. If you work for a company with such resources, the insights you seek may already be in your files. If your company doesn’t have its own R&D department, never mind: no correlation exists between how much a firm spends on research and how well it profits.
You don’t have to be an expert in various fields to borrow from them. Often, people entering a field from the outside can see fresh possibilities. Look for businesses that are doing things similar to what you would like to do or that serve a related demographic. Borrow from what they do. For example, in 1970, Bernard D. Sadow saw people in an airport trying to carry heavy suitcases; he also noticed an airport employee using a wheeled “skid” to move heavy equipment. Synthesizing these observations, Sadow had an insight that led to mounting similar wheels onto suitcases.
You can also innovate successfully by changing the market: Find something large and make it smaller or pinpoint something expensive and produce a cheaper version for another niche. You can also lift a single quality or attribute from one field and apply it to another. Steve Jobs did this when he took the aesthetic qualities of calligraphy and applied them to the Macintosh, thus revolutionizing computer design.
Red Thread 3: Watch People to Get Insights
Many people dream of discovering “game changers” – ideas that make everything different or transform how people behave. “Understanding culture” is the secret to such innovations. Observe people, consider their behavior and discern why they do what they do. Weave your innovation into their existing behaviors and motivations. Make connections among the details of what you see. These connecting insights must be new and exciting enough to carry you through the work of innovating – and to take those who use your innovation through the act of change.
Don’t get fooled by an intense first impression: just because something is vivid doesn’t mean it will lead to a functional innovation. Working insights often emerge from your “associative ability,” the gift of seeing connections among “unrelated concepts.” When an insight is real, it will seem like “simple, pure truth,” that is, so obvious that everyone should be able to see it.
To find a path to “monetize” your insights, look for “unmet consumer needs.” Address them by harnessing aspects of your organization that aren’t being fully utilized. “Knowing how to monetize is critical to success and a key separator of creativity and innovation.”
To find a path to “monetize” your insights, look for “unmet consumer needs.” Address them by harnessing aspects of your organization that aren’t being fully utilized. “Knowing how to monetize is critical to success and a key separator of creativity and innovation.”
Observing “without any preconceived notions or expectations” can generate useful insights, but it requires intellectual independence. When anthropologist Jane Goodall saw chimpanzees using tools, she was stunned, and her discovery changed how the scientific establishment defined a human being. Procter & Gamble incorporates direct observation into new product development. P&G visits homes worldwide to see their products in use. Seek opportunities to watch people using products at home, at work and in other arenas. Ask them about what they do and why. Expect gaps between the stories people tell about their daily lives and how they really act.
You are born with the capacity to empathize with others, but you must hone this skill to become more adept at discerning their feelings. “Develop your innate empathy skills to find out how your customers truly engage with products and why they go back to them.” You want to become better able to identify the “symbolic value” that objects hold for people. This value goes beyond the physical or functional and is often “where the ‘money’ is in terms of innovation.” Learn how to frame and reframe the problem at hand to dig down to new perspectives. Introduce metaphors into your questions and develop the habit of challenging the way things have always been done. Avoid market segmentation research. Such studies are quite expensive, and they often fail because their techniques are rudimentary and their results are shallow.
Identify how the problem you’re trying to solve fits into people’s “cultural connections.” You don’t want to change or fight a prevailing culture, but you do want to understand existing cultural currents so you can align with them. Innovations diffuse through cultures in a standard pattern: “A few early adopters” try an idea and then spread it to others, who repeat the process through their social networks. Five factors determine how quickly ideas spread across networks: the “relative advantage” an idea or product offers over older practices, how much it costs to make the shift, how hard the transition is, how easy trying the innovation is and how visible its benefits are.
To go to market, your idea must be recognizable as being new. It should be innately attractive and should communicate a fresh identity. To draw people to your product, make your design as simple as possible. Combine its various aspects “into a pleasing and harmonious whole” and eliminate everything extraneous. Design should fuel sales and function: the faster potential customers understand how and why your product is unique, the more likely they are to buy it. Simplify your product to reduce the number of active choices users must make. The form your simplicity should take depends on the culture of your target customers. Simplicity looks very different in Sweden than it does in Asia.
Red Thread 5: Passion Required
Passion drives successful innovation. To harness passion properly, understand what it is and what it does. Passion doesn’t mean sticking blindly to your original idea, no matter what feedback you get. Instead, passion provides the fuel that keeps you going as you explore new areas, get stuck, try new approaches, fail and try again. Failure is an essential and repeated step in the innovation process. Be prepared to have your ideas simply not work...and to try again.
Innovator Sir James Dyson says that he made “5,127 prototypes” to get his famous vacuum cleaner the way he wanted it. That meant he had failed 5,126 times. More recently, online superstars Pinterest and Rovio Entertainment – the creator of the video game Angry Birds – tried many different approaches and endured several slow starts before finally achieving their current success. Like them, innovators must learn from failure and push “past the disappointment.”
Properly understood, optimism can help innovation. Optimism doesn’t mean assuming things will be easy or remaining cheerful no matter what. It means persevering despite intense doubt and frustration. Optimists learn from failures and are able to put events in perspective in ways that anchor them in reality. Even for them, trying something new can be scary. It requires committing to the innovation process and exercising balanced, critical judgment. You must learn – through trial and error and by testing your ideas – to trust your intuition.
Business in general and innovation in particular don’t exist only to earn money. They can make the world better. “Sustainable growth” comes from innovations that make a profit without damaging the environment and that have positive social implications. Unilever worked with India’s government to create networks enabling entrepreneurial women to distribute products in “remote villages.” The right innovation expands “the responsibility of business in society.”
Weaving It All Together
Properly understood, optimism can help innovation. Optimism doesn’t mean assuming things will be easy or remaining cheerful no matter what. It means persevering despite intense doubt and frustration. Optimists learn from failures and are able to put events in perspective in ways that anchor them in reality. Even for them, trying something new can be scary. It requires committing to the innovation process and exercising balanced, critical judgment. You must learn – through trial and error and by testing your ideas – to trust your intuition.
Business in general and innovation in particular don’t exist only to earn money. They can make the world better. “Sustainable growth” comes from innovations that make a profit without damaging the environment and that have positive social implications. Unilever worked with India’s government to create networks enabling entrepreneurial women to distribute products in “remote villages.” The right innovation expands “the responsibility of business in society.”
Weaving It All Together
Red Thread Thinking derives from an Asian legend of “an elderly god” who helps people come together in “seamless interconnectivity,” knitting a new fabric made up of “those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance.”
About the Authors
About the Authors
Debra Kaye is an innovation expert and a partner at Lucule, an innovation consultancy.
Karen Kelly is an experienced writer and collaborator. She formerly worked as senior editor at Warner Books.
Karen Kelly is an experienced writer and collaborator. She formerly worked as senior editor at Warner Books.
getabstract book summaries??????? isnt this wrong?????
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