Creativity Unlimited: Thinking Inside the Box for Business Innovation

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Shaking the box up and down

This chapter contains exercises to help you to develop ideas for new products and concepts. They are based on your current products or business, and aim to identify potential new orientations towards new target groups, areas of application and categories. It's easy to be seduced by the idea of big changes but don't underestimate the small ones. The creative result has nothing to do with the length of the step you take.

Business innovation is fundamentally about the continuous development of new products and concepts. In marketing and management literature, this is often simplified to ‘you should stick to your core business’. This is seldom a piece of advice that holds in the really long term. For example, how would things have gone for the rubber boots manufacturer Nokia, or the record company Virgin, if they had just stuck to their core businesses? In addition, many people tend to interpret the term core business far too narrowly as meaning to keep doing the same thing all the time. But even if Volvo, for example, is sticking to its core business of motor vehicles, it is also extending it all the time with new products and concepts; naturally enough through new (and for the company unexpected) vehicles such as cross-country vehicles, but also through services such as rental and financial solutions and even IT (and you can also find the Volvo brand ...