“There Must Be a Better Way”: 5 Steps to Successful Innovation

It’s fall in Pennsylvania, and the mornings are starting off in the 40s already! I can either start my SUV with my remote starter or just get in and push the button and the engine is instantly running and the heat is blowing. Seldom did I ever think about how this wonderful thing called the electric ignition came into being until I read the story of Charles Franklin Kettering, a brilliant inventor and engineer with 186 patents. He was head of research for General Motors where he contributed to the creation of the electric start motor, car light systems, Freon refrigerant, and electric cash registers, to name a few.

Kettering, like a number of amazing entrepreneurs I have met over the past two and a half decades of consulting, always started with the thought, “There must be a better way!” Below are five common steps that every innovator and problem solver takes to make the world better (or at least their products!).

1. Opportunity Identification

Creating new products, processes, or services starts with, “There must be a better way.” Whether it was Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia who could not afford the expensive rent of San Francisco having people pay them to sleep on an air mattress (resulting in Airbnb), a father trying to make his daughter’s computer game a little better (resulting in the creation of the Sony PlayStation), Travis Kalanick looking for a cheaper way to get a ride after spending $800 for a private driver on New Year's Eve (yep – Uber), or Marc Randolph and his partner trying to find a way for people to more easily access movies (good guess – the birth of Netflix), they all were trying to solve a problem.

2. Idea Generation

When looking to generate new ideas, one of the frustratingly common mistakes leaders and teams make is to start finding what is wrong with each new idea. This is called fire hosing, and it is as painful as it sounds. Take a break from critique and allow some fresh ideas to flow, even if they end up being unfeasible or hinging on the ridiculous. When a leader does not allow safe space for idea generation, people will stop thinking about how to solve problems because they want to avoid getting hit by the hose!

3. Idea Experimentation

Sometimes we move a bit too fast – jumping from idea to implementation and skipping over the experimentation phase. Experimentation looks to answer questions such as: “How do we know it is feasible?”,  “What will be needed to make it work?”, and “Will the donors/investors and customers get excited about it?” Micro experiments are a vital step before fully launching – they help you test the waters, see how deep it goes, and prevent the potential for embarrassment and the loss of credibility. But as we have learned so many times when a new operating system is launched for our phone or computer, even experimentation does not always surface all of the surprises that await collision with the real world.

4. Idea Implementation

Marc Randolph, one of the co-founders of Netflix wisely said, “You’ll learn more in one hour of doing something than in a lifetime of thinking about it.” Every “good” idea has to be tested in the real environment. In his book That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea, Randolph tells the anxiety-producing story of what happened on Netflix launch day when the site went live and they began taking DVD orders (yes - it was before streaming video). The servers kept crashing. They ran out of boxes. Then paper. Then tape. Then ink. So they kept running to the store to buy more! Every idea will need to be tested in the real world of implementation.

5. Idea Precision

No one really knows if an idea will succeed after exposure to real customers. But one thing is certain – every idea will need time for refinement. Feedback from customers and your team provides the data needed to make it better, faster, easier, or cheaper. One of the insightful phrases attributed to Charles Kettering is, “Failures are the finger posts on the road to achievement.” While critique and negative feedback stings, it is also an opportunity to get better by honing a good idea to even greater precision.

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Jay Desko is the CEO of The Center Consulting Group and brings experience in the areas of organizational assessment, leadership coaching, decision-making, and strategic questioning. Jay’s degrees include an M.Ed. in Instructional Systems Design from Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Leadership from The Union Institute.