Stephen Shapiro argues that vague innovation prompts like "How can we improve the business?" waste time and money. Instead, use targeted lenses: the leverage lens asks which customer segments are most profitable, focusing effort where it matters most.
Chapters
So give me. Give me a practical example of a question that an organization might ask that doesn't yield the solution they're looking for and how that reframe can take place. So most companies, the way they tend to think about innovation is the suggestion box. Maybe it's not a box attached to a wall, sure, but. But it's the equivalent of that. They might create an email address where people can submit ideas, or they use sophisticated idea management software. But the default question for most suggestion boxes is, how can we improve the business? Now, the problem is, if you ask these big, broad, abstract questions, you invite a lot of wasted energy. So if you ask the question, how do I improve the business? And you ask your employees, you could literally get thousands of ideas of which maybe two or three of them will be considered valuable. So that's the wrong way to do it. So what we need to do is take the lenses and actually break it down. So, for example, let's just say you wanted to have greater revenues, you wanted to sell more. Well, if you're going to sell more, maybe one of the questions that you want to ask is, well, who do I sell to? Where I get the greatest leverage? The first lens in the book is the leverage lens, which is all about where do we get the greatest results with the least amount of energy? So you might need to go back and say, well, who are our most profitable customers or our most profitable customer segments? And then we can start breaking it down into smaller pieces where we have a higher likelihood of solving the problem with a lot less wasted energy. Pick up a copy today@invisiblesolutionsbook.com.
