The Secret Behind Innovation
The secret behind innovation is the power of questions. To discover innovative ideas, ask innovative questions. To realize imaginative solutions, ask imaginative questions. To revolutionize your industry, ask questions your competitors haven’t even dreamed of yet.
Consciously or not, you are constantly asking yourself questions, and it is the quality of these questions that defines your ability to think and act creatively.
Your business is destined for mediocrity if your main question is What is my competitor doing today? or How can I cut costs or better manage inventory? These questions are important, but they are secondary to the bigger questions that drive your business forward such as:
- What do our customers want more from us than anything else?
- What is the primary problem we’re solving for our customers today? How can we totally eradicate that problem in the next generation of our products/services?
- What will our customers want tomorrow (even if they don’t know it today)?
Notice how all of these questions are customer-centric. Do you think Apple’s Steve Jobs or Proctor & Gamble’s A.G. Lafley try to innovate for the sake of innovation? Without a crystal ball (although Jobs does seem to have one), they create new products in anticipation of the customers’ needs.
With the power of superior questions, there are no boundaries to what you can create.
Think differently. Ask the questions others are afraid to ask.
What if you were one question away from a major breakthrough in your business? What might that question be?
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Great Post. It remains me of the Eistain quote.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning” – Albert Einstein
Definitely a classic Einstein quote!