The most interesting things I've learned about innovation

Focus on the activity, not on the people. People hire a product or service to do a job, to achieve a goal.  What is that job? How effective is the product or service in doing that job?

Reference: Activity Centred Design, Jobs-To-Be-Done

Start from perfect and work your way back. What would the activity be like if it worked perfectly? How might it fail and be less than perfect? This doesn't tell you what the innovation is but it tells you where you need to innovate.

If you started from scratch, how would you design the ideal product / service / system?  How many design constraints are real vs due to historical habit?

Reference: Idealised Design, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ)

Just amplify what is already working.  Is there an aspect of your product or service that customers have already responded positively to?  What if you pushed that to the edge?

Have there been any instances where the customer experience was dramatically better than normal, even if by accident?  What if that was the average experience?

Reference: Edgecraft, Positive Deviance

If you're in a position of strength, match innovation to neutralise it. Weaker organisations must use a strategy of differentiation to succeed against stronger organisations.  As a stronger organisation, you can bleed a weaker organisation to death by just matching any differentiating innovation they come up with.

Reference: New Lanchester Strategy, Escape Velocity

Revolutionary innovation has always come from people messing around with technology. If we look at the most powerful society-changing inventions:

• Airplane
• Automobile
• Telephone
• Radio
• Television
• Computer
• Internet
• SMS
• Cell phone

... none of them relied on user-centred design research.  Design research is great for incremental innovation, which is the vast majority of useful innovation.  But revolution, so far, has come from technologists messing around.

Reference: Technology First, Needs Last