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

Different routes to big ideas

What about some of the other cases of breakthrough innovation we looked at earlier in the book?

Take Curves, the international women-only fitness franchise. How did Gary and Diane Heavin come to this big idea? Did they start by specifically looking for a way to reinvent the fitness industry? Did they first do a lot of formal research into customer needs and market trends? Did they go out and look at some of the most successful fitness clubs to see if they could learn from the work of others? Did they generate a ton of different ideas to explore many possible creative solutions? Did they hit a roadblock in their innovation efforts and then try to detach and let the whole thing incubate in their minds? No. They simply began to notice that quite a number of their female customers were feeling uncomfortable about training in a fitness club full of men. This key insight—based on observation and empathy alone—led them to think about a simple but revolutionary solution to the problem: a fitness club with “no makeup, no men, and no mirrors.”

When Michael Dell started building and selling personal computers to his fellow university students in the 1980s, was he consciously looking for a way to change the whole PC industry? How did he come to his disruptive ...