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Nick Jankel
- 4 Mar, 19
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There is a misconception of where good ideas come from. In most cases, really good ideas come from something existing which is then adapted to another area.
Cross-industry innovation is the clever way to jump-start your innovation efforts by drawing analogies and transferring approaches between contexts, beyond the borders of your own industry, sector, area or domain.
These analogies can be drawn at various levels, from products to services, to processes, to strategies, to business models, to culture and leadership.
There are many cool examples of cross-industry innovation in action. I keep on searching for these examples (on multiple levels: process, business model, management, …) to build a good searchable database and I also publish some of them on my blog.
54% of CEOs (IBM IBV study) indicate that they see competition coming from other sectors in the near future. For organisations it is of vital importance to have a proper ‘remix strategy‘. So think about choosing the right approach for your cross-industry innovation efforts. There are 3 main approaches:
Note: Many organisations apply all three approaches at the same time on different levels.
It starts pretty simple, by just asking yourself: ‘What Would x Do?‘
Many start-ups also use this for business model remixing, they present themselves like: ‘We are the x for y‘, for example: ‘We are the Airbnb for Meeting rooms‘. So, now ask yourself: ‘How would x tackle our situation?‘ or ‘How can we become the x for y?‘.
Organisations who optimise for best practices (benchmarking, Six Sigma, balance score cards, …) do great within their sector, yet competition does exactly the same things! In the end this will only drive prices and profitability down. The key is to go for ‘next practices’ which in many cases come from totally different sectors or domains.
The potential of ideas and approaches from other areas is tremendous. Still only very few organisations apply cross-industry innovation strategies in any kind of structured way.
Why do we hold back? Why don’t we look beyond our borders more often? We often seem to search for solutions in the areas we already know.
The not invented here syndrome actually holds people back from using ideas, concepts and approaches from other domains. It’s my plea to embrace other people’s and other sector’s ideas and build upon them. This way not invented here becomes already invented there!
In most cases it’s ego which blocks us from learning from other areas, so we need to go from ‘EGO’ to ‘(L)EGO’. To decompose and recompose our industry variables and actually using building blocks from other areas to generate new solutions and approaches!
“Ask youself, What Would x Do?”
The model I outline in my keynotes and walk through in strategic / business and leadership development projects with clients, comes down to these 3 steps:
The natural way to start is to look at how other companies do things, yet there is so much more to be learned from way different domains. In the book ‘Not invented here: cross-industry innovation‘ we outline various different areas to look at and to use the principles behind these (sometimes radical) approaches.
To help you jumpstart your innovation efforts by looking at other sectors and domains there are 3 good starting points:
Contributed by:
Nick Jankel