Strategic Innovation Strategic innovation can redefine potential customers; one example is Canon's pioneering focus in the 1970s on the development of photocopiers aimed at small businesses and home offices rather than large corporations. Strategic innovation also can reconceptualize delivered customer value, as in IBM's shift from selling hardware and software products to selling complete solutions in the 1990s. Or strategic innovation can redesign the end-to-end value chain architecture, as in Dell Computer's direct sales model, introduced in the 1980s. Creativity Techniques There are a number of creativity procedures that can be used to help you discover new mind funnels and generate how-to statements that reflect new perspectives on a problem situation. Let's look at some of these. Creativity Blocks Constancy means that an individual becomes wedded to one way of looking at a problem or to using one approach to define, describe, or solve it. It is easy to see why constancy is common in problem solving since being constant, or consistent, is a highly valued attribute for most of us. We like to appear at leas moderately consistent in our approach to life, and constancy is often associated with maturity, honesty, and even intelligence. Lateral Thinking The simplest way to describe lateral thinking is to say: "You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper." This emphasizes the searching for different approaches and different ways of looking at things. Innovation Leadership There are five key leadership strategies that need to be instilled to build a successful innovation process. Here are those five strategies. Leadership Strategy 1: Design and Implement an Innovation Strategy. An innovation strategy spells out how you intend to embed and systematize innovation in your firm, and how you will turn it into an ongoing, measurable, manageable process. It defines how you will organize the search for tomorrow's opportunities and what is expected of everyone in the organization. Research to Discover New Product Ideas There are many methods that can be deployed to discover ideas for developing new products. Dimensional Analysis lists all of the physical characteristics of a product type. Having obtained such a list, creativity can be triggered by asking questions such as: "Why is the product this way?" "How could the product be changed?" or "'What would happen if one or more of the characteristics were removed?" Corporate Innovation Management must recognize the risk/reward relationship and find organizational mechanisms for handling it. And it must communicate a clear understanding that reasonable risks are acceptable, since they are the handmaidens of progress. On the innovative front, two methods are available for dealing with risk: diversification and cheap failures. They can and should be used in concert. Brainwriting By 1970, research had shown that groups of people who sat quietly listing their ideas on their own pad of paper generated more ideas than a comparable group of people brainstorming. This finding led to the development of Brainwriting.