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

A practical definition of insights

Look up the word insight in a dictionary, and you will find it defined as “a new and penetrating understanding about a particular situation or a problem.” It’s about grasping or discerning the true nature of something; suddenly noticing or perceiving a matter clearly or deeply; literally seeing into a situation (hence in-sight) in a way that sheds light on or helps solve a problem.

In their article, Unleashing Hidden Insights, Marco Vriens (from Microsoft) and Rogier Verhulst (from LinkedIn) define an insight as “a thought, fact, combination of facts, data and/or analysis of data that induces meaning and furthers understanding of a situation or issue.”²⁸ It is something that has the potential of “re-directing the thinking about that situation or issue, which then in turn has the potential of benefiting the business.”

Executives at Mars, the global chocolate manufacturer, refer to the process of discovering insights as “peeling back the onion,” in the sense that it is about looking beyond the obvious by methodically removing successive layers of shallow, superficial information in an effort to drill down to the deeper and more profound truths about something.”

In The Art of Insight, Charles Kiefer and Malcolm Constable wrote that insights “result in a dramatically improved understanding of a situation or problem such that we see things more deeply and more accurately than before.”²⁹ That’s why Jeremy Bullmore, member of the Advisory Board at WPP, ...