How can you create innovative ideas

Generating innovative ideas is not an easy task. However, you analyze the world that surrounds you and it seems that they do not stop new technologies, business models, products and services and, each of those ideas is more novel and innovative than the previous one and is, given such circumstances when oneTo think and question, how can it be that this idea has not occurred to me?

Undoubtedly, innovation is the key to success in any field and, ideas, are the necessary gasoline on which all those innovations that fascinate us are supported. Whether you want to undertake a new business, that you are considering evolving an ongoing project or that you want to differentiate your business from your competitors, innovation and the ideas that promote it are the cornersevolve.

I guess, if you have reached this post, you will ask yourself questions of the type, how could I be more innovative? How can I have better ideas? What capabilities do I need to innovate? Well, in this article I will try to convey a series of considerations that you should take into account to be able to be a person who generates more innovative ideas.

Surround yourself with problems

Innovation implies solving problems of the type. Just as you read it, if you surround yourself with problems you will have an inexhaustible source of situations to solve and I can assure you, without much fear of making mistakegive.

Think a little why ideas are great ideas? . . . because they solve great problems or many problems at the same time. I'm going to give you a little example that you sure know. WhatsApp, the messaging application that most of us use arose in a context in which, especially young people, communicated by SMS. These SMS in addition to having a high price for young people had limitations in the number of characters that each message could contain, you could not send icons, the multimedia files (MMS) were even more expensive . . . as you can see, there were many problems to solveAnd, in that context, an app that eliminates all those problems from a plumice arises.

Listen and listen to the world around you

Together with the previous point. If you surround yourself with problems and, in addition, you are an observer person and with high active listening capabilities I can tell you that you are fifty percent closer to being that person who believes that new idea that revolutionizes the world.

I invite you to talk to your customers, your bosses, your classmates, the baker, the hairdresser, the mechanics or the plumber. All these people have problems that need to be solved. I assure you. Develop your empathy and emotional intelligence, observe, listen and ask to understand what your problems and your needs are. Live those problems in your own meats if necessary in order to internalize what are those situations that require innovation and good ideas to be resolved.

Always keep an open mentality

Innovation begins with an open mentality. You have to be willing to question the status quo and consider new perspectives. The way to be able to carry out a new idea is not something simple and, for this, it is essential that you open your mind and not have a limiting mentality.

You will find a multitude of people (sometimes yourself) that will tell you that this idea you raise is impossible to be carried out. On many occasions, these people will be authorities in their area of ​​knowledge and this scares. But I will tell you a small trick, extract from those people all possible problems, observe, ask them questions, listen and take out all the information you can of them. Basically, apply the two previous points and you will see the amount of opportunities that open on the way.

Someday I will tell in the envelope area of ​​this website an experience that I had with one of my innovation projects. As a summary I will tell you that I participated in a conclave that was between a professor with all his research team, a person who had earned his good money by selling, in his day, the Windows Media Player to Microsoft and a technological expert fromreference. Until that post arrives I will summarize it that, finally, they accepted my idea as the best of the proposals even though my director and many colleagues did not believe in it. The only difference between them and I was that I always observed, I had clear problems, I heard and, above all, I had the open mentality that none of them had throughout the process. By the way, you can also contact me by LinkedIn if you kill you curiosity.

Pose hypothesis, experience and validate your ideas

An innovation project is a hypothesis in itself that has to be tested and validated. Therefore, you have to formulate your own hypotheses that will help you on the way to shape your idea. On the other hand, we must not forget that innovation implies high doses of uncertainty. Do not think that the people who invented WhatsApp, Airbnb or Apple had an absolute certainty about what I was doing was going to work.

Steve Jobs himself was fired from Apple for trying to implement his vision of how things had to be, so he thinks that Uncle Steve cost him, we will not be less.

Create experiments that allow you to learn and validate your hypotheses, expose them to your customers, your users or whoever can give you an opinion, more or less formed, to help you see if you are going for the right way or not. With that information, reinterpret your idea again and continue to shape it until it is something that solves problems and contribute value.

Work on your lateral thinking

I do not know if you will have ever heard or read about this but, in short, lateral thinking is the ability that will allow you to be more creative. Thanks to working lateral thinking you will solve complex problems in uncommon forms.

Design Thinking, for example, could help you develop your lateral thinking since it has a multitude of tools that allow you to define problems, frame them and develop creative solutions to these complex problems.

But if you do not want to be an expert in Design Thinking or officially become a product designer, I simply invite you to try to be more creative, to think about the solution to problems from different perspectives than usual. Set many how could it . . . ? And, Truquito, includes some madness in the question please.

Some examples of questions that will allow you to be more creative can be: how could I solve this problem in a simpler way? How could this process improve? How could I do it if it were a magician? How could you use this service if it were a grandfather? How could you handle this app without hands?

Demystify innovation and visionaries

And finally, demystify innovation and innovative visionaries. Innovating is not a simple task but it is more difficult if we think it is something unattainable and not done for us.

Innovation is only limited by limiting thoughts, I have many experiences in my professional career that show me. One thing you have to understand is that it depends on the scope in which you move something can be an innovation and a great idea . . . or not. Everything is based on whether you solve a problem within that area . . . or not.

Imagine a company in which thirty people, each in a part of the world, have to manage the company's accounts with paper and ball. I know that it sounds very crazy but, for that company, will implement and use an Excel sheet in the cloud would be an innovation or not? Well, I give you this example, not exactly lived like this, but very similar, because I have taken innovation projects ahead, specifically one . . . that being something much more complex, it did not distribute much from this example.

And as for innovative visionaries. They are not winged unicorns impossible to achieve, they are people like you and as me, very good yes, very great and creative, also but, when you understand and internalize all the processes that lead you to innovate, you realize that innovation is available toWhatever moderately restless and have the desire and commitment to move forward.

I hope it has been useful to you and that, if you know someone who can serve this post you share it with that person so you can start innovating the world needs your ideas!