The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

LESSONSTO TAKE AWAY

Extend the boundaries of your business. (Don’t get locked into a particular market sector, or a single product or service category. Imagine ways to stretch beyond your current business into new spaces and domains—either adjacent to your core or perhaps far outside it.)

Try to find new uses for existing ideas. (Something that has been invented for one thing may have an exciting alternative use. Ask yourself how it might be radically repurposed or redeployed to create value in a new setting.)

Develop an elastic view of your company. (Instead of defining it in terms of what it is or what it does, try to think of your company in terms of what it knows—its unique set of skills—and what it owns—its valuable assets.)

Innovators repurpose, redeploy, and recombine resources. (They leverage existing competencies and assets in new ways, new contexts, and new combinations to open up fresh opportunities for value creation.)

Identify and leverage underutilized resources. (Imagine your organization, your value network, and the world around you as a rich reservoir of skills and assets that could be exploited differently or recombined in profitable new ways.)

Leverage resources from others. (Look for ways to combine your organization’s own resources with the competencies and assets of other companies to produce innovative new solutions for customers.)