Four Questions to Spark Innovation

Does the problem that you’re fixing exist somewhere else and would it make sense for you to fix it there?

The designer Giorgio Armani founded his clothing business in 1975 and soon found widespread success. What motivated him was the desire to fix the chaos and clutter of the world – and he did this by giving his audience an experience of simple elegance delivered via clothes. But with time, Armani realised that similar problems – of clutter, chaos, mess, disorder – could be identified in other areas of life. He’d fixed it in one area, could he now move on to addressing it in others?

It’s easy for a company to become fixated on the medium in which it first launched – and therefore to fail to see that its message (which is the really valuable bit) could happily and lucratively transfer.

This can happen to artists. Andy Warhol began his career making paintings. His values – an ironic, half-critical, half-loving look at the ephemera of American life – seemed ideally and perhaps exclusively suited to canvas. But with time, Warhol stepped back and came to a richer realisation. His message could as happily exist in a book, a film, some photographs or a magazine.

Of any current business activity, we can ask ourselves: what is the bigger version of this? One can ask: what is the underlying principle within the business? And what would it look like for the business to apply that principle in larger ways?

When teasing out the underlying principle of a business, we shouldn’t look at what the business actually does as the move it is making. So the principle of a nut manufacturer isn’t making nuts, it is making healthy snacks. The principle of a phone company isn’t making phones, it is communication.

Innovation is the key because – in the sense we’ve been exploring – it is the process of working out business-solutions to problems that are most important to us.

The products that any company is currently offering might only be a small part of the customer’s real needs in a given area. Creatively re-defining the business area that a company is in can radically alter the sense of what its core tasks might be – and where its future opportunities might lie.