'Innovate' or 'I-No-Wait'

You get into any of the following situations,

• Your boss requested you to come up with a Business / IT strategy / Road-map
• You need to come up with Best Practices for a Technology / Business Solution
• You need to review a design document / solution document / code
• You need to provide some Info-graphics around some data
• Fix a bug in software application
• Come up with comprehensive comparison between platforms / products

What will you do first? Try to search & gather any existing data, views, fixes, solutions (or simply Google) or think / brainstorm something yourself? I am sure 90+% will do the former. However it is because of those latter 10% we have access to such enormous content.

You may ask, why any of those above requests would need innovation? Let us take the last one (comparison) as an example. You can come up with exhaustive list from what is available public or take a step further, and start thinking from customer perspective...(why would anyone need a comprehensive comparison). At the end it should make sense to the customer on choosing the right one for the right need. The comparison sheet would be just a doc or a failure if it just provides ranking based on features without any value add on our recommendation based on customer needs.

Google has made our life easy and the same time tried to fence our thoughts. Yes, we are in fast pace world and people need answers right now and the easiest to gather anything from others and do a mash up. But how can we trigger innovation or start putting our own perspective, views, thoughts around anything?

Exactly, and you will agree to it and more so people are already debating on "Apple after Jobs" has become a follower rather innovator.

Note the last part of above quote, "they realised something that shoot holes in how we've been thinking about a problem". We have been fencing our mind, thoughts and created a mesh around it with existing ideas, solutions, views, thoughts, data, information and we just pluck it when required.

Why companies like Uber, Facebook, AirBnb, Amazon are innovators in their field is because they were able to crack by thinking a solution which can simplify things further & so the business. It's all how we simplify things, think from different stakeholders angle and yet generate business out of it. Uber is able to continue the innovation as they initially thought on how they can simplify things for Taxi drivers and not just commuters. It makes a lot of difference and help in bringing new ideas. I got garbage is another such example where the main stakeholder / target are Rag-Pickers and not the ones who generates waste.

I will leave you with one new idea which came to my mind when I started thinking of different stakeholders. Truecaller became so popular mainly not in finding numbers but to cut-off all spam calls. Now what if a bank or any service provider wants to contact you for something you had requested or notified them. Now, how many times they would have contacted and you disconnected as Truecaller said it's a Spam. Can we think of some kind of message / notification sent when you receive a call stating "This is regarding something you requested on xx/yy/zzzz" or "This is regarding issue you raised for April billing". It ensures better customer reach for the service providers & you can be sure to pick such calls.

In fact this article I published in linkedIn in 2016 and in the past 1 or 2 years or so, we started getting SMS, messages stating something similar to what I had written above.