I’ve been using a cool thinking tool for many years, which seems to capture peoples’ imagination. Here’s how it works.

Picture the scene. You’ve organised a focus group to figure out how people buy cars. Or perhaps you’ve put together a brainstorm to develop ideas for a new model. You’ve got a room and you’ve got the usual suspects – and as a result you get all the usual ideas.

Nothing wrong with this up to a point, especially if you’re looking for incremental innovation. But I’d suggest that both approaches are next to useless if you want to uncover some really deep insights or develop something entirely new.

For example, what if instead of running the focus group with ‘ordinary’ people you jumped into a car with a series of extraordinary people and went to visit a few auto dealers unannounced? This is something I did for a Japanese company a few years ago. The unusual suspects included an architect, a product designer, an anthropologist, a psychologist, an MBA student, an insurance salesman, a supermarket space planner and an assorted bag of iconoclasts and revolutionaries. Half were men; half were women and ages ranged from 21 to over 60. Crucially, all of the people were an expert in a field other than auto sales or marketing.

On another occasion I put together a similarly eclectic group to talk about the future of aesthetics for a paint company that was interested in trends that were driving paint colours and finishes — only this time the meeting of minds met for a dinner discussion inside an art gallery. Why an art gallery? – partly because it was full of paint and aesthetics, but largely because it was an inspiring and usual space which I believe directly influenced the quality of the debate. Of course, you have to pay attention to what the group is saying (or doing) – or, as Procter & Gamble’s VP for Design and Innovation Strategy puts it, you have to “listen with your eyes”.

OK, so it sounds fun, but what are the practical benefits of such melting pots?

First, the groups are incredibly diverse in terms of skills and experience. This means you get a high level of cross-fertilisation, which results in new perspectives and horizons. People are also highly articulate and enjoy meeting people from outside their own discipline, which again sparks the conversation.

Second, the groups are not run as formal meetings with agendas, discussion guides or set timeframes. Groups are usually run in the evening, often over dinner, and the result is a relaxed atmosphere out of which come casual conversation, insights and ideas. There is obviously an objective buried deep beneath the surface and there is moderation too, but this is kept to a minimum. The best groups I’ve organised haven’t needed moderation beyond an introduction and the discussion has continued into the early hours.

Third, because ‘innocent experts’ are outsiders, they have no knowledge of what is politically correct or expedient within the host company. As a result they tend to ask quite fundamental or naive questions. They have no knowledge of ‘the rules’ and are therefore quite fearless. A good example of this was an innocent expert (in this case an historian) who asked a water (utility) company what it was for and what business it was in. The client (the head of R&D, who on this occasion attended the group) was at first insulted by the apparent stupidity of both questions, but eventually realised that they were catalysts for thinking about where the company could go in the future.

The answer to ‘What business?” included discussions about the transport of liquids, networks, telemetry, environmental monitoring, infrastructure development, purity, waste, drinking water, and even the role of women as gatekeepers to family health (the company was at the time exclusively run by male engineers despite the fact that over half their customers were women). Each of these ideas was then used as a springboard to develop potential strategies, products and services.

Where do you find these great people? As they say, there is no short cut to anyplace worth going, so you’ll need to do some research. There are a handful of companies like Fresh Minds www.freshminds.co.uk that can help you source some bright young people, but there’s really no substitute for building a brain bank of innocent experts yourself.

Obviously you need to be careful that innocent experts are not so removed from the area under discussion that they can’t contribute. This was a point made by Malcolm Gladwell a few years ago, who argued that “innovation comes from the interactions of people at a comfortable distance from one another — neither too close or too far”. I partly agree.
One of the problems with internal brainstorms is that people are too close to each other and meetings lack diversity and freshness. There probably is a sweet spot somewhere between knowing too much and too little, but my experience is that the more removed you are from a problem the greater your clarity of thinking. Knowing just enough has its uses, especially for evolutionary or incremental innovation, but naivety is probably what you really want if you are pursuing a more radical agenda. That’s why most paradigm shifts don’t come from industry incumbents or people with the most experience.

So what are my top 5 tips for using your own innocent experts’?

1. Spend time finding the right people. You can’t conjure up a great network overnight
2. Invest money on an inspiring thinking space or event. It will pay dividends
3. Watch the group dynamic and never mix people that are close in terms of skill
4. Don’t be afraid to let the group run — if it’s working don’t stop it or interfere
5. Innocent experts are generally more turned on by whom they’ll meet, the subject matter and quality of the discussion, than by how much you’re paying them.

Take a trip to the small town of Rheinburg in Germany. It’s home to a 4,000 square metre supermarket created by Metro, the world’s fifth largest retailer. If you believe the hype, you are looking at the future of supermarket shopping.

In this store you’ll find the latest retail innovations, including intelligent weighing scales that can identify and price fruit and vegetables by sight (whether loose or packed in plastic). You’ll also find tablet computers that can be attached to shopping trolleys and switched on by inserting a customer loyalty card. Once activated you can download your shopping list (which you emailed to the store earlier), check your favourites list, print out personalised special offers or get map directions to the washing powder aisle.

There are also information terminals scattered around the store to help you find out a bit more about a particular brand of wine, get a print-out on a new type of toothpaste or request a recipe for the chicken you’ve just bought. Needless to say the store uses RFID technology to ensure that the shelves are never empty.

Moving forward a few years, an advertisement might start playing the moment you pick up a bottle of Pantene shampoo – or if the aisle recognises you as a heavy shampoo buyer (the Prada store in New York already shows footage of models wearing certain clothes if you hold the clothes up to a nearby screen). You might be greeted by name as you enter the store or be directed to a loyalty queue for a speedy check out. Or perhaps there won’t be a checkout because an RFID reader will automatically scan your bags as you exit the store with the bill being automatically sent to your credit card company or your e-wallet.

But do customers really want such high-tech innovations?

In the future there will be lots more old people – and old people don’t like technology. But they might like stores with better lighting, non-slip floors, lots of seats and big easy to read prices (you’ll find all of these innovations in the Adeg Aktiv 50+ food market in Salzburg, Austria). Future migration back to cities and the rise in single person households means that low-tech convenience stores, 24/7 kiosks and giant vending machines (like the McDonald’s owned Tik Tok Easy Shop in Washington DC) may be more in touch with customer needs too.

In other words, perhaps rolling out identical retail formats is history.

For example, giant enclosed shopping malls are already starting to look like dinosaurs because shoppers are too busy and too tired to fight their way through giant car parks and endless corridors just to buy a pair of shoes. In the last 10 years the number of women who consider shopping a “pick me up” has fallen from 45% to 21% in the US while another survey said 53% of shoppers “hate the experience”.

Why is this the case? One reason is that most shopping centres have no authentic identity or sense of self (‘anywhere places’ I’d call them – because the look and feel is the same from Boston to Bangkok).

Making shopping more theatrical is one way of breaking this monotony, so it’s no surprise that supermarkets are now trying to capture the sights, sounds and smells of French markets, while mall operators are trying to theme developments along the lines of thousand-year-old Moroccan bazaars.

Selfridges’s department store in London even describes itself as a theme park where customers are encouraged to buy ‘souvenirs’ of their visit. Recent foot-fall generators
have included a regional food festival, a Brazilian event and a conceptual art installation where 600 naked people rode up and down on the escalators.

Similarly, shoppers are getting fed up with giant retailers bulldozing local communities and turning streets into homogenised strips that are devoid of life after dark (75% of people in Britain think that supermarkets like Tesco – which takes £1 for every £8 spent in Britain – have become too powerful and would support stricter government controls). This is a fact that has not escaped the attention of the world’s largest retailer, which is testing smaller neighbourhood stores dubbed ‘Small-Marts’.

So maybe the future is ‘stealth retail’ — shops that don’t operate like shops and malls that don’t look like malls. This is not a new idea. Back in the 1960s Victor Gruen, the architect of the modern mall, was calling for retailers to “incorporate civic and educational facilities” into shopping centers. In other words, shopping malls and supermarkets should function more like old-fashioned town centres, with non-retail elements like schools, doctors, libraries, churches and sport facilities. A good example is a Swiss retailer called Migros that has created health and education centres.

But connecting with the local community doesn’t just mean parents collecting tokens for school computers. It means placing the school alongside the supermarket (like Sainsbury’ have done in the UK by teaming up with a company called Explore Learning) or using retail space for community purposes like Tesco has done by putting a Police Station inside a supermarket in Essex (UK). Going local also means utilising local labour and selling local produce. Farmers markets have been so successful in recent years that there has even been talk of allowing them to use supermarket car parks after hours.

Another important trend is Everyday Low Pricing (EDLP), but low prices often carry a high cost for other countries. Moreover, increased consumption doesn’t seem to be where people are heading (read Growth Fetish by Clive Hamilton and Status Anxiety by Alain De Botton). If you put a coat and bag checking service into a store people would be able to carry (thus buy) more. True, but this misses the bigger picture. People are beginning to realise that buying more things doesn’t make them happier.

In 1989 58% of people in the UK said they were happy. By 2003 this figure had dropped to 45%, despite the fact that average incomes had risen by 60% over the same period.

So perhaps the ultimate solution is for retailers be more than just shopkeepers.Maybe their higher purpose is to build and support communities. This would mean creating aesthetically pleasing environments that are integrated with all aspects of the local area. It would also mean employing friendly people rather than impersonal machines. This may add to the cost of goods, but you can’t build a cut-price community.

So what are my top 5 predictions for retail over the next decade?

1. Department stores will be reinvented to appeal to an older demographic
2. i-tags and RFIDs will trigger a revolution in mobile and contactless payment
3. More people will buy online for basics allowing retailers to focus on experiences
4. People will look to retailers to edit (curate) the plethora of products that are available
5. Wireless devices will allow shoppers to interrogate products and companies on shelf (often with negative consequences).

Like predictions about the paperless office, forecasts about a cashless society have been around for a while. For example, AC Nielsen research says that only 10% of transactions in the US will be cash by the year 2020. Logically this makes sense because e-commerce is at it’s most powerful in information processing industries like financial services.

The idea is essentially that notes, coins and cheques are all hugely inefficient and will be replaced by digital money, which is easier to process. Governments love the idea of getting rid of cash because up to 25% of all cash in circulation globally is used for illegal purposes (in the US a staggering 25-30% of people don’t have bank accounts). Companies also love the idea because e-payments are faster and much cheaper.And as far as multi-nationals are concerned the sooner there’s a single global currency the better.

From a technological point of view the cashless society is certainly getting closer. PayPal already has 150 million accounts, which makes it bigger than most national banks. In South Korea 4 million banking transactions were carried out via cellphones in June of last year and 300,000 people have bought cellphones into which you can plug a memory card securely encrypted with financial data. In Finland and Japan you can pay for train journeys and restaurant meals by simply waving your phone in front of a payment terminal. Meanwhile in Australia and Austria you can buy car-parking spaces using your phone. Hello mobile micro-payments and bye-bye cash.

Back in South Korea more people own cellphones than computers so it’s pretty easy to see why phone companies could be the banks of the future. Or, as Bill Joy has pointed out, your phone will become your wallet and a bank or credit card company will give it to you for free. And don’t forget that in the future all phones will be GPS equipped so products like motor or holiday insurance could be sold by the minute on a pay as you go basis. Why? – because your insurance company would know where you are in real time and could calculate risk and payments accordingly. Thus the scene with Tom Cruise in Minority Report suddenly becomes very real with the prospect of retailers (including banks) knowing who you are and what you’re worth (or at least what you spent last time) the second you step into their store.

Could the cashless society really happen? Yes. Early signs include the fact that 14% of Britons regularly throw away coins because they can’t be bothered to carry them around.In the US electronic payments (including debit and credit cards) surpassed cheque payments in December 2004 for the first time in history, while in Australia cheque usage has fallen from 50 per person in 1998 to 30 per person in 2003.

Other signals include the fact that Air Miles are now the world’s second largest currency according to The Economist. Better still, Everquest currency is now more valuable than the Japanese Yen and is regularly traded for real US Dollars according to Edward Castronova, Associate Professor of Economics at California State University(see gamingopenmarket.com).

Indeed it sometimes seems that the only people who like ‘real’ money are older change averse people and they won’t be around forever. Nevertheless, all but the most geekish members of Generation Y would have to admit that there is something inherently substantial and emotionally reassuring about paper (and metal) money that’s difficult to replicate in cyberspace. Logically paper books and newspapers should have been replaced by e-books and e-news a long time ago. But they haven’t. Thousands of years of tradition, human nature and practicality have put he brakes on these innovations.

Then there’s the issue of trust. There are lots of trends that can be used to support a scenario where banks become extinct — acceleration of technology, product convergence, convenience, new channels and brand promiscuity to name just a few. But remember most people don’t just dislike banks. They hate them. They hate the queues, the fees and the lack of any meaningful choice. In the UK there’s even a web-based service that allows customers to record conversations with their bank to provide evidence of poor service or misleading advice.

So if Toyota or Yahoo branch out into financial services (as they’ve done in Japan) the banks could be in for a pretty rough ride. And that’s before Microsoft, Apple or Vodafone start to offer banking services based on emerging technologies like digital signatures. Hello hyper-competition. Bye-bye margins.

So is it the beginning of the end for physical banks? Not necessarily. In the US branch expansion is a major trend. In Australia local community banks (and conversely private banks) are all the rage.100 years ago the bigger a bank was the better. Now the opposite is increasingly true. As globalisation and virtual worlds take hold people are being drawn back to local businesses and physical contact. People are also craving simplicity, which is why banks like HBOS (UK) offer a limited choice of easy to understand products. This is good for customers, staff and profits.

Equally most markets are polarising between low cost providers and premium suppliers offering personalised solutions. So cheap Internet banking via a cellphone can happily exist next to branches with people offering advice on big-ticket items like home loans.
If you’re rich you can have the best of both worlds — phone banking with instant access to a personal assistant and swipe card entry to flagship branches offering legendary customer service. And somewhere in the middle you currently have 7-Eleven’s Vcom
24-hour bill pay kiosks.

But we’re back to trust again. UK supermarket Tesco has been successful in offering basic products like ‘cash back’ and car loans but supermarket credibility is strained when you start talking about more complex matters such as wealth management. Or take the fact that whilst we regularly take money out of ATMs only 5-10% of us are happy to deposit money back in. Then there’s the issue of identity theft — a $56 billion problem in the US and up 600% in the past 5 years in the UK.

ID theft is a problem that could bring the cashless society to its knees, but it’s also spawning a number of innovations like identitytheft911.com (Citibank) and ID theft insurance (progeny/AIG).

We started with some predictions so let’s finish with a few more. Nobody can be really sure what will happen in the future although it’s a fair bet that change will happen.
Here are a few ideas you can bank on.

1. We’re on the verge of a technological explosion that will benefit new entrants.
2. Mobile micropayments will revolutionise the shopping experience.
3. Physical banks and customer service are not going away any time soon.
4. If cash disappears private currencies and barter schemes will flourish.
5. Digitised money will eventually be embedded in everything from clothes to people.

1. The past is more important than the future.
It’s been said many times that history is no guide to the future. I disagree. It is also unsaid that companies do not need to understand where they have been to see where they’re going.
Hence most commercial organisations have very little sense of their own history and what happened last year is so yesterday. This is a tragic mistake because memory and experience can prevent us from making the same mistake twice. It is also a shame because whilst many things change the fundamentals often do not. People act and react with the same primeval instincts that they‘ve always done. On a practical level older employees were a source of knowledge before the term knowledge management was invented. Equally, looking at the history of products and markets often uncovers insights buried beneath the service. Add to this the fact that many trends are cyclical and you might start to see how to use history to invent the future. If, for example, you looked at the history of newspapers you would discover that they were first sold in coffee houses in the 1700s. So maybe that’s where Starbucks got the idea? Or how about aerosol paint? That idea was first thought of about 40,000 years ago.

2. The end of outsourcing?
If companies are outsourcing strategy, innovation, R&D, manufacturing, logistics and distribution what exactly are they left with? Sure, outsourcing saves money in the short term and specialists tend to be better than generalists. But as Tom Peters says you can’t shrink your way to greatness. So maybe 2005 will see a move back to in-house innovation and a realisation that whilst ideas, provocations and catalysts can come from the outside, research, development and implementation can’t.

3. Conversations as catalysts for change.
Theodore Zeldin will readily admit that most of his ideas will fail. But let’s face it, so will most of us. And anyway, surely it’s better to go out in a blaze of glory as a beautiful failure than an invisible and mediocre success. Zeldin’s ideas are mostly focussed around work and ways of making work more satisfying. He is also a champion of conversation and says that if more people talked to each other properly they would discover new interests. Shared interests and conversation spark ideas and idea can change the world.

4. To thy own self be true.
There are some people who believe that you can make anyone creative. The aim of all organisations in 2005 and beyond should therefore be to pursue radical creativity and innovation. Putting to one side for a moment the question of whether all people can be creative, there is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that all companies can’t. Most radical innovations (some say as many as 70%) come from guys in garages, not industry incumbents. Inventors are creative precisely because they don’t sit inside inertia ridden corporate structures. However, inventors are usually hopeless at implementation whilst this (along with incremental improvement) is exactly what big companies are good at. So maybe the best innovation process for big companies is simply to spot good ideas from elsewhere and either adapt or licence the idea or buy the company. In other words, know what you’re good at and don’t try to be something that you’re not.

5. The need for speed
There are at least a dozen ‘megatrends’ out there at the moment but if I had to pick one for 2005 it would be speed. Technology is speeding up and so are we. 15% of meals in the US are now eaten in cars and apparently 50% of soup is now eaten out of home. Hence the rush by food companies to create portable products and the continued growth of 24/7 availability.
But like most big trends there’s a counter trend. In Europe The Campaign for Slow Cities want to slow things down while in Australia 25% of people say they have ‘downshifted’ in the last year to readdress their work-life balance.

6. Happiness on the agenda
According to sci-fi writer and futurist Bruce Sterling everything we own in the future will be cuddly. I don’t know about this but maybe we’ll want everything to make us happy. Happiness is an emerging trend that’s set to take of in 2005. There’s an Institute of Happiness in Australia and writers like Alain de Botton (Status Anxiety) and Clive Hamilton (Growth Fetish) are challenging the idea that growth and material possessions automatically make us ‘richer’.
A Study by the Henley Centre (UK) found that in 1989 58% of people were ‘happy’ compared to 45% in 2003 despite a 60% increase in average incomes. Meanwhile a study by Cornell and the University of Colorado found that spending on experiences is more fulfilling than spending on possessions. So if you’ve got a product you’d better get busy turning it into an experience. This idea also has serious consequences for companies who have always assumed that the way to keep employees happy is to promise them more money.

7. Charles Handy.
If you’re interested in the future of work get your hands on a few books by management thinker and social philosopher Charles Handy. His track record is impressive with stints at Shell and the London Business School. His forecasts are spot on too with predictions like the decline of the traditional organisation and the growth of portfolio careers.

8. Older younger and younger for longer.
In the future children will grow up faster while adults will stay younger for longer. There will be less young people around but they will be more sophisticated and experienced. This is a dream come true for some advertisers but there will be negative social impacts too.
Girls are maturing earlier sexually and children having kids will effect policy in areas like education and employment. Conversely, there will be more older people around which will be good news for industries like medicine, travel, home improvement and leisure. However, it could be bad news for innovators because older people tend to be conservative and reject anything new. Or maybe not. 17% of Sony Playstation users in the US are aged over 50.

9. Open source innovation.
Someone once said that to get a good idea you need to have a lot of ideas. Suggestion boxes are a bit old hat these days but the principal of asking everyone for ideas is very sound.
However, most companies still seem to run innovation as a (small) department and consider the aims, processes and outcomes as some kind of state secret. A model for the future could be the open source software movement. So instead of doing everything your self why not open up the search for ideas and on-going research and development to customers and suppliers? A good example of how to do this is the global ideas bank where anyone can submit or vote for an idea.

10. Problems looking for solutions
Here’s an innovation tool that’s often hidden in plain sight. If you’ve looking for new ideas don’t. Look for problems instead. Go and talk to whoever runs the customer complaints department and ask for a list of the top 10 moans and groans. Alternatively ask some customers . Or maybe grab a product designer, an psychologist and a social anthropologist and watch people using your product or service. What doesn’t work and what could be improved from a customer experience point of view?

One of the consequences of life speeding up it that people have less and less time to think. The culture of business has also shifted to the point where instant communication
and solutions are deemed more important than real insight or rigour – both of which
require periods of study and reflection.

This lack of thinking time and the transience of so many subsequent solutions is also related to a lack of thinking spaces. Most modern offices are designed to accommodate as many people as possible at the lowest possible cost. This is considered efficient.
The eighteenth century (sweat) factory model still dominates but there are a host of new aural and visual distractions. But sterile open plan offices do not open minds. So are most desk jockeys flogging a dead horse?

Of course there’s always a brainstorming room with brightly coloured walls, beanbags and felt pens. But as one marketing director recently said to me “if I have to sit in that room one more time making mission statements out of playdough I’m going to kill myself”. Other more inventive solutions to cubicle culture include ‘collision areas’ like cafes and staircases where employees are encouraged to exchange ideas serendipitously.

But imagine if instead of designing formal spaces to create unplanned meetings or mixing up departments you mixed up whole companies? What if, instead of putting five companies on five floors of a building, you mixed up the whole building? What would happen to thinking if someone from Orange telecom was sitting next to someone from Apple computer?

The Green House Project is a nursing home that works on a similar principle. Retirement homes are usually sterile, soul destroying places. Bill Thomas got so fed up with these temples of loneliness that he built something different — the Eden Alternative. Eden encourages residents to use their creativity and accommodates 120 residents, along with 12 cats, 6 dogs, 1,000 pot plants and a Vietnamese pot bellied pig. The building also houses a kindergarten and a disused courtyard has been turned into a playground. Children play, birds sing and the dominant sound is of life, not death.

Historically the relationship between space and thinking was well known – but they don’t make Cathedrals like that anymore. Nevertheless, some people try. The new Strata Centre at MIT by Frank Gehry is intended to stir the creative juices and inspire people to think a little differently. As Mr Gehry himself puts it “if you keep out the light, the mice are dwarfed.” Could the same be true with ideas? Likewise the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stamford University has been built on the premise (if not the promise) that the architecture of a laboratory can influence a scientist’s level of creativity and productivity.

Other organisations that have experimented with the idea that intelligently designed spaces can influence ideas include ad agencies like Chiat/Day in LA who attracted considerable media attention in the 1990s with it’s innovative office.Unfortunately, the icon design managed to alienate the very people it was intended to inspire when staff found out that personal desks and equipment had been banned and that desk space had to be reserved like a restaurant table (as Virginia Wolff said, we also need a room of our own). Nevertheless, the space was ahead of its time in some areas like the neighbourhood (village) layout and the coffee house atmosphere it engendered. Whether the building made the ads any better is a moot point. It certainly built awareness and helped to attract talent – at least until the talent found that they had to store their files and personal belongings in their cars.

Other slightly misguided attempts to design cathedrals for the mind include an office for a media agency in London where all staff sit at a giant 66 ft communal table (no privacy), an email company which had a real lawn in the middle of the office (no water) and a company that created ‘snow’ each morning using shredded waste paper (no point). There’s even a theory that people are more creative if they remove their shoes and socks although I’ve yet to find a company that tests this on a daily basis.

But is the quality of work genuinely related to the nature of the space you’re sitting in? Looking at history again the answer would appear to be no. Great artists have not generally worked in inspiring studios sipping fine champagne. They rent the cheapest space available and then struggle to pay for it. Perhaps this is the point.

Maybe the reason that so much innovation is so mediocre is because companies devote too much time and money to it and people get too comfortable – 70% of all major innovations and discoveries didn’t come out of a garage by accident (actually they did, but that’s another story).

So perhaps we’re all focussing on the wrong problem. Maybe you can’t make offices inspiring places (or design fake ‘garage’) and we shouldn’t even try.

Research by the Roffey Park Management Institute (UK) says that most insights and ideas occur away from the office. They either happen in neutral locations (going for a walk, in the car or, in my own case, on aeroplanes) or they happen at home (in the bath, in bed or in the garden). Interestingly, none of these places involve coloured beanbags, felt pens, great architects or teamwork. They’re just places were individuals are ‘dreaming and drifting’ and thinking about something else other than work.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to make offices more interesting. Maybe the solution is to let individuals design their own spaces in the sense that they’re allowed to personalise their immediate surroundings. Given the rarity of privacy and quietness these days maybe we should try to bring back the idea of personal offices and not look too discouragingly at people who spend hours looking out of the window.

Back in the 1990s Asda (a UK supermarket now owed by Wal-Mart) gave people signs to hang on their doors (offices had doors back then) that said “Quite please. I’m having an idea” Perhaps in the future people will be given thinking breaks to take their brain for a walk.
Or how about reinventing tea breaks or the afternoon siesta? Trends often signify unmet needs so it’s interesting that while only 20% of US companies allow staff to sleep at work, one wide-awake company called Metro Naps in New York is offering stressed out executives a midday rest facility at their sleep station at $14 for 20 minutes.

What can you do to your space to increase the quality of ideas? Here are five ideas:

1. Sit next to someone you don’t know and tell them what you’re working on.
2. Instead of taking work home, take bits of your home to work. Personalise your space.
3. If ideas elude you, don’t just sit there. Stop and do something totally different.
4. If your office doesn’t feed your mind find a favourite place that does.
5. Constantly refresh your space. Bring in outsiders like artists to change it.

Not so long ago companies created departments to create innovation. But the result was often that innovation was turned into a state secret. The only people who knew what was going on (and therefore the only people who could really contribute) were the chosen ones inside the innovation department. Not surprisingly, this approach limits both the quantity and quality of ideas so companies have started to search for new ways of developing new ideas.

One new idea is distributed or open source innovation where customers (or anyone else for that matter) are the co-producers of the products and services they consume.
Open source software development began when one smart individual realised that he wasn’t half as smart as all the other people he knew if he put them together. The open source movement worked in software because the original motive was altruistic — the end product was given away for free — and people thought they were on the side of David fighting a mighty Goliath (or Bill, as most people know him).

This is networked innovation made possible by the Internet. Ideas (or problems) are made freely available to anyone that cares to look at them. The result is smart software with the bugs ironed out in record time.

Recently the idea has been transferred to all manner of projects ranging from an open source encyclopaedia (www.wikipedia.org) and collaborative industrial design (www.thinkcycle.com) to open source aeroplane design, cola recipes, film scripts and beer. The latter was developed with the help of some self-appointed beer aficionados (found on the Internet) who created everything from the name of the beer to its packaging and advertising. Even NASA has embraced the idea by using volunteer scientists (or ‘clickworkers’) to identity and catalogue craters on the surface of Mars.

But perhaps the biggest opportunity for open source innovation lies with pharmaceuticals. One of the problems with traditional pharmaceutical R&D is that the patent system effectively blocks outside insights or enhancements to a particular discovery or invention. It also means that there is little or no incentive to develop drugs aimed at people (or countries) with little or no money to spend.

There are some other parallels between open source software development and pharmaceuticals research. Both tend to employ young researchers who are keen to be involved with ‘big vision’ projects and professional status is often seen as being more important than financial reward.

So how can open source principles be adopted by commercial organisations? In some ways open source can be thought of as a suggestion box scheme – albeit one with a giant transparent box. A topic is posted on a website and anyone from industry experts to members of the public can contribute to the solution. Everything is transparent in the sense that all ideas are shared and discussed in public. In some instances people will do this for nothing, while in others they will ultimately have to be paid in some way.

Some detractors argue that open source innovation is little more than giant focus groups but there are big differences. The first is sheer scale. Focus groups rarely involve more than a hundred people. Open source can involve thousands and still turn things around faster than more traditional approaches. Second, focus groups usually ask people to react to ideas. Open source asks people for solutions and allows ideas to build cumulatively. Third, focus groups rely on a representative sample of people who are ‘ordinary’ and by definition uninterested. Open source relies on people who are articulate, passionate and enthusiastic.

Another point, articulated by both John Kao and Ross Dawson, is that traditional innovation can be compared to classical music whereas the open source model is more like Jazz. Classical innovation is usually driven by a single leader with a team following detailed notes. The end result is faithful in letter and spirit to the original objective.Open source, in contrast, involves individuals improvising against a background score. Sometimes there is no leader or set framework and the results can be quite unexpected.

A good example of a company moving towards an open source approach is Procter & Gamble. The company has an objective to generate 50% of new product ideas from outside the company. P& G’s Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment process (CPFR) is a collaborative and transparent process that allows P&G’s customers and suppliers to improve its supply chain. Another example is P&G’s use of the virtual technology market yet2.com. P&G lists every one of its thousands of patents on yet2.com in the hope that it will facilitate connections and ideas from the outside.

OK, so how can you use the open source model to kick start innovation within your organisation? Here are some thoughts to get the ball rolling.

1. Innovation is not a department — make sure it’s job #1 for everyone.
2. Bring back the company suggestion box — but make it virtual and transparent.
3. Don’t just ask for ideas — clearly formulate the problem and then ask for solutions.
4. Seek out and attract enthusiasts for your product and collaborate with them.
5. Give away your product for free to people that might help you to improve it.

Can anyone be creative? Companies and consultants alike say the answer is yes.

The British Government for one says that we are all creative and it’s education and workplace environments that are at fault for not providing enough recognition or encouragement. This is a fashionable argument, but is it true?

I would argue that some people are blessed with natural gifts, while for others circumstances and training shape what they’re good at. We can’t all be good at everything and therefore, by definition, we’re not all creative.

However, in meritocratic societies, there’s a belief that deep down we’re all the same and we can all be good at anything if we just put our minds to it. This applies to creativity too. Some consultants would have us believe that if companies would just adopt the right culture, and if employees would just follow the right processes, the floodgates of creativity will open. In other words, all companies can be creative if they just put their budgets to it.

There are a number of problems with this belief. First, even if it’s true that we can all be creative, we can’t all achieve creative greatness. You can teach anyone to play the piano, but you can’t teach anyone to be musical or be a concert pianist.

Having said this, in my experience the problem inside most organizations is not coming up with more creative ideas. It’s usually finding ways to find the ideas you’re already got and filtering the good ones from the bad. I was once involved in a one-day ideation workshop for Campbell’s which yielded over 450 new ideas. But the best idea by far was an idea they’d thought of themselves a year before and done nothing with.

Secondly, there’s widespread confusion between creativity (the ability to see things differently and have original ideas) and innovation (the ability to make new ideas actually happen). Or as William Coyne, Senior Vice President for R&D at 3M Inc once put it: “Creativity is thinking of new and appropriate ideas whereas innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas within an organisation. In other words creativity is the concept and innovation is the process”.

One of the main problems with innovation is that companies fail to make this distinction. Creativity is embraced because it sounds like fun (and appears to be low cost). But if you open your mind too far your brain will fall out. So companies embrace creativity (ideas) and hope that innovation (action) will happen by osmosis.

And this is where it really starts to fall apart. Some companies seem to be incapable of implementing anything new — or if they do it’s usually taken so long that the opportunity has usually passed them by or the idea has been diluted so far it’s invisible.

For example, companies like Unilever have known about the fresh pasta opportunity for ages but done almost nothing about it. The development of Mars ice cream is another well-known example of a great idea being put on ice for years.

The main enemy of ideas is not risk but inertia.

Companies also think they can be great at both creativity and innovation when generally they’re either good at one or the other. The trick is to know which you’re good at and then to go outside for the other. However, doing this involves a level of self-knowledge and confidence that many companies lack.

The good news is that even if a company is hopeless at coming up with new ideas
they can employ all sorts of people for almost no money to do it for them — which probably says something about the value of ideas without implementation.

Alternatively you can employ a consultant to put a process in place to help you generate and capture more ideas yourself. This will probably work quite well if what you’re after is a constant flow of incremental innovations (continuous improvements to existing products and services). However, if you want to change the world you’re probably better off looking somewhere else. Rules are precisely what paradigm shifters break.

Real originality has never emerged from a formula – it generally comes from small companies, inventors, entrepreneurs and mavericks working in back of garages and garden sheds. So what can you do if you’re seeking this sort of radical innovation?

Maybe the trick is not to try and act like a small start-up by imitating their ‘processes’ (which most of them don’t have), but simply to seek out their ideas and reapply them to your own situation. Procter and Gamble call this ‘find and re-apply’. Unilever call it ‘creative swiping’. I’d call it innovation transfer.

Better still, rather than stealing their ideas, simply buy them (licence their idea or just buy the company). The one thing the small ideas guys usually don’t have is precisely what the big guys are so good at – the skills to turn a new idea into an innovation. Corporates have the experience to get new ideas into market. They also have the knowledge to scale them up if they’re successful and the legal resources to protect them.

So don’t always think that you can do everything yourself.

According to James Andrew and Harold Sirkin at the Boston Consulting Group there are three approaches to innovation: the Integrator approach, the Orchestrator approach and the Licensor approach. Again the trick is to know which you’re best at and work out what suits the specific situation or market.

Most big companies try and control everything (the integrator approach), but this takes time and money. So much time and money in fact that urgency and focus have a tendency to disappear. However, this approach can suit big companies in established markets where a core skill or brand that can be leveraged.

The second approach is to join forces with other companies to implement an idea (the orchestrator approach). This reduces the risk (and the returns) but it’s a smart move when you’re dealing with an idea that’s outside your comfort zone (e.g. a new technology or new distribution channel).

The final approach (the licensor model) is to simply sell your idea to someone else.
This suits ideas with a strong intellectual property component where you’re too busy
(or you lack the necessary skills or brand credibility) to implement it yourself.

So, to sum up, don’t confuse creativity with innovation. Identify what you’re good at and then stick to it. Most individuals and organizations are not great at everything and it’s a sign of strength to get some help or co-operate in the area where you’re weakest.

Here are a few tips and suggestions to increase your level of creativity and innovation.

1.Work out what your core skill or offer is and innovate around that area.
2. Don’t look for new ideas until you’re exhausted your supply of old (existing) ideas.
3. If you’re having trouble sorting your ideas use an idea matrix. Click here for example
4. If an idea’s great but just doesn’t fit, don’t waste it — try selling it to another company.
5. People and markets naturally reject new ideas so think about paths of least resistance.

Time famine is a well documented trend that’s driving a plethora of innovations. One of my favourites is the guy on eBay who is selling pre-loaded iPods to cash rich time poor individuals. Presumably it won’t be too long before this person discovers market segmentation and you’ll be able to buy iPods pre-loaded with specific bands or genres of music.

Other interpretations of this trend include a move towards portability by food companies like Mars who are keen to get a ‘share of mouth’ from people who no longer have time to sit down and eat (in the US15% of all meals are now eaten in cars).

Take newspapers. One reason why they’re are a declining market is because people no longer have the time to sit down for breakfast to read them. A solution is to change the method of delivery to something more in line with modern lifestyles and routines. Hey presto online newspapers. Some of these e-papers allow you to customise what you receive. Not quite the ‘Daily Me’ but it’s getting closer. Or if you prefer your news made from trees there are still several ways to save time. If you live in Switzerland there’s 20 Minuten — a newspaper that can be read in less than 20 minutes. In the UK there’s a magazine called The Week that summarizes the top stories from the previous week’s newspapers.

Too much information (TMI) is a close relative of Time famine. Some people are now so overloaded with information during the day that they can’t cope with an overly long menu at night. So in London there’s a restaurant called Clark’s with barely any choice at all. They do most of the thinking and all the cooking for you. Salt restaurant in New York works along similar lines. Indeed, it can only be a matter of time before someone opens a restaurant with absolutely no choice at all — they’ll choose all the food and all the wine for you.

TMI also has a couple of distant cousins — Too much choice (TMC) and Too many options (TMO). Again these trends are spawning a host of new products and services centred on the need for edited choice. Examples include retailers using lists of the 100 best books of all time and magazines writing about 50 places to see before you die. There’s even a shop in London called Microzine where the merchandise is ‘curated’ by the owner and a store called Hype in Sydney that searches the world for the very latest and greatest sneakers.

Why is all this happening? Basically it’s because trends like speeding up, customisation, consumer choice and instant communication spawn counter trends. People no longer have the time (or the energy) to make informed decisions based upon a rigorous examination of every alternative — so they’re paying other people (and technology) to edit the choice for them. This is giving rise to manufactured simplicity – a new industry of professional ‘sifters’ that sort information for other people.

Some companies are fully aware of these trends and do their best to make things as easy as possible for their customers. For some this means stripping out unnecessary functionality to create products like washing machines with just a couple of simple buttons.

Other companies are relying on more technology to create simplicity, which seems like a contradiction and ultimately a recipe for disaster to me. Cars are a case in point. There’s clearly a market for the latest gizmo loaded, computer controlled wonder wagon. But surely there’s also a market (retirees for example) for a car that’s built as simply as possible. A car that just goes from A to B and when it doesn’t is easy and quick to fix.

This need for editing applies to corporations too. Procter and Gamble own over 250 different brands but 50% of global revenues and profits come from just 12 of them.

Meanwhile, some consumers are creating their own simplicity by switching off as much technology as possible. MIT graduate Eric Brendle opted out and moved to the countryside without any technology at all. This created so much time to think that he managed to write a book called Better Off: Flipping the switch on technology.

I recently met an individual who had removed the voicemail on his cell-phone because it was creating more work. His argument was that if something was really important the caller would always ring back.

Other manifestations of this desire for simplicity include the Slow Cities movement (a spin off from the Slow Food movement), downshifting and no email Fridays. There’s even a book about going slow rapidly racing up the worldwide best seller lists (In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré).

If you sell a product or a service to time starved, information flooded, stressed out customers what can you do to make their lives a little easier? Here are some thoughts:

1. Listen to what your customers want ahead of what R&D say they can do.
2. Think about time consequences — remote call answering doesn’t benefit customers.
3. For some companies nostalgia is an emotional short cut to eras that denote simplicity.
4. If you use lists remember to keep them really short.

In his classic 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that the people who achieve “fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have either been very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.” In other words, when it comes to innovation, organisations can be disabled by experience and specialisation.

Both Einstein and Picasso were at their most original in their early years – the young Einstein invented the special theory of relativity in 1905 when he was just 26 years old. In 1907 a 26 year old Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and effectively invented cubism.

Of course the idea of youth was itself new in the early 1900s and it wasn’t until the 1950s that someone ‘invented’ teenagers. But some companies still haven’t quite caught up with the idea that it’s young people (a company’s staff and customers) that are the most likely to invent the future.

There are plenty of reasons why the most innovative people in any organisation are the newest recruits. Young people tend to have the most energy and the most confidence. They’re also ‘outsiders’ and have little respect for tradition or orthodoxy. Their lack of experience can also be an asset because they’re not restrained by history or preconceptions. Older employees, on the other hand, know that it has all been tried (and failed) before.

This lack of experience was something that Seymour Cray (an early designer of high-speed computers) seized upon. Cray had a policy of hiring young fresh faced engineers because they didn’t yet know what couldn’t be done. A company called Fresh Minds (www.freshminds.co.uk) works on a similar principle. They supply freshly minted graduates to some of the world’s top companies.

Another issue is that the longer you work for an organisation, the more you adopt groupthink and the further removed you become from real life (how customers think, feel and behave). I once worked with one of the largest automotive companies in the world who wanted to understand how people really bought cars. In one meeting we innocently asked a group of 35 senior executives when they had last bought a car on their own with their own money. Not a single person could remember. In contrast, the younger employees who were not given cars had a real grasp of reality as a result.

Another car company, Toyota, once put together a ‘board’ of children to advise them on product development. Hasbro has done the same with toys and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre once asked some school kids to attend a series brainstorming sessions on the future of technology. Indeed, as Grouch Marx said, “a six year old child could understand this — quick, get me a six year old child”.

Just after the American Civil War a doctor called George Beard got interested in whether there was a connection between age and creative ability. He found that there was and that creativity peaks around the age of forty. Moreover, he estimated that 70% of global creative output came from people under the age of forty-five.A few years later another study by Harvey Lehman observed that, whilst the finding was true, the relationship between creativity and age varied according to discipline.

Conversely, it’s also some of the oldest employees (and especially those that are closest to retirement) that have the best ideas because they have little or no responsibility for the outcomes. They’re not restrained by the practicalities of implementation and they no longer care what anyone else in the organisation thinks about them. Mix these people up with some young minds and the results can be explosive.

So what are the practical lessons here for innovation teams?

1. Involve some of the newest recruits. If you don’t know any find some.
2. Think like a kid yourself sometimes — keep asking why?
3. Hire curious people and don’t always get hung up on experience.
4. Plug into the brains of older employees (even those that have retired).
5. Mix innocence with expertise (new ideas often favour youth, whilst development and execution often suit experience).

Finally, ensure that teams are multi-disciplinary. This doesn’t just mean getting someone from marketing and someone from R&D. Involve customer service, customer complaints, sales, finance and production. And whatever you do, try not to put together a group where everyone is the same age, the same sex and went to the same school. Because, guess what? they’ll probably all have the same idea.

Albert Einstein said that “if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. In this vein, here’s a list of some of my favourite ideas and innovations from the past 18 months, together with a few comments and suggestions. Work out for yourself which are sublime and which are ridiculous.

• A company in Japan has developed a bicycle that pumps up its own tyres. Kinetic energy from the wheels drives small pumps hidden in each wheel hub. Has anyone applied this idea to automobiles, buses or trucks?

• If you’re the type who likes to live dangerously, especially on holiday, then you might be interested in Dogtag insurance. The UK based company covers a huge range of sports from scuba to snowboarding. Using a unique dog tag identity tag, which is worn around your neck at all times, emergency medical staff can confirm that you are covered for medical insurance and will instantly know of any medical conditions. It looks pretty cool too. Why can’t other ‘invisible’ products be given a physical presence?

• A Swedish company has developed an organic alternative to cremation. The problem with burning bodies is that the process releases toxins into the atmosphere. Freezing bodies to —196C and then shattering them into very small pieces (and then removing the water and metal content) is deemed a safer alternative.

• Pet owners these days don’t like the idea that their pet might die before they do, so Procter & Gamble has created an Iams (petfood) branded MRI scanning service for cats and Dogs. The company is also launching a pet insurance service to pay for the US $1,200 scans. What other human innovations could be transferred to animals or vice versa?

• Dulux in the UK has created a paint that makes it easier to re-paint white walls. The paint starts off pink but dries white making sure you don’t miss anything.

• A group of rather inventive cultural activists called the Carbon Defence League recently put together a web site (www.re-code.com) featuring the bar codes of everyday supermarket items — only with all the prices reduced! Visitors to the site could print the bar codes onto stickers and re-price their weekly shop. What else could you print for yourself?

• How do you know if your toddler is wearing the right sized baby shoes? One way is to make shoes with transparent soles so you can take a look at their feet. Genius.

• A Japanese phone company (NTT DoCoMo) has introduced a smart tag that allows shoppers to interrogate clothes mannequins. If a suitability-equipped phone is held next to the tag information such as price, colours and sizes is instantly downloaded to the phone. Given our thirst for information (and our lack of time), surely this technology could be used elsewhere?

• We’ve seen transparent cameras and see through staplers. Now a transparent canoe has been designed for people who want to see what lies beneath. Not recommended if you live in shark infested waters.

• A US car safety group has come up with the novel idea of printing expiry dates on the walls of tyres. What else could use by dates be applied to?

• Triangular taps produce the smallest drips, according to mathematicians at Harvard University. The discovery should influence inkjet printer design and may increase printer resolution. Could the idea work with pens or needles?

• In what has been referred to as a trend for ‘creative sentencing’; a judge in the US has ordered a woman driver who killed a man in a car crash to carry a photograph of the victim in her wallet.

• Forgotten you door keys again? No problem with a domestic door lock that operates by fingerprint recognition. The system recognises up to 20 different prints.

• Headblade is a razor specially designed for shaving your head (which, of course, is a different shape to your face).

• What if, instead of typing your name into google, you could scan in a picture of your face and find out how many times your photograph or image appears. This could be used to monitor illegal surveillance or usage.

• Known criminals in south-east London (UK), are likely to get a big surprise with the installation of street cameras linked to facial recognition software. Similar technology is being used in a hockey stadium in Utah.

• Lick’ems are the world’s first glow in the dark popsicles. They’re sold in selected dark venues like night-clubs. Is there a market for other glow in the dark foods or drinks?

• Idea from Japan — selling cheap voice recorders to forgetful old people. How else can we stop people forgetting?

• Sony and another Japanese company, Toppan, have invented a paper disc that can hold 25 gigabytes of information. This is five times the amount that can be stored on conventional DVDs. The paper disc has an added security advantage because it can be shredded, burned or simply torn up.

• Radio Your Way is a normal AM/FM radio that, thanks to an in-built timer, allows you to record radio programmes in the same way as your VCR. Brilliant. Why has nobody thought of this before?

• Virgin Atlantic Airways has an in-flight bar and massage service while Gulf Air has a ‘Sky Nanny’ service on selected flights. What else remains to be introduced on-board aircraft?

• An author in the UK is being paid by Ford to feature a Ford Fiesta in her new novel (but are they putting copies of the book into new Ford Fiestas?).

• Given all the technology fitted to modern cars, it’s remarkable that the gauge in conventional fuel tanks, which is linked to a float sensor, is still inaccurate. ‘Empty’ could mean anything from nothing to a gallon or more. Touch Sensor Technologies has developed a gauge that uses technology usually found in flat electronic keypads.

• What’s the biggest problem with glass? Fifty years ago it was the fact that it broke. These days it’s the fact that it gets dirty (cue nanotechnology and self-cleaning glass). Another less obvious problem is the fact that you can see through it. Transparent glass is energy inefficient so what’s really needed is glass that’s transparent in winter (self-heating) and opaque in summer (self-cooling). An innovation called Smartglass does both.

• Quiet steel is a metal that makes much less noise. The idea is to place a 0.001-inch layer of polymer between two sheets of metal (in a similar way to safety glass). Quiet steel absorbs vibrational energy and cuts down on noise in everything from cars to computers. Could the idea work in reverse? — maybe there’s a niche market for noisy versions of quiet products, for example a noisy wristwatch.

• A German supermarket chain has opened a store in Austria aimed at older shoppers. The stores feature permanently large prices — and if you still can’t read them there are magnifying glasses available on each isle. The aisles are also wider than normal, the shelves lower, the floor non-slip and the lighting anti-glare. Some of the trolleys are also designed to hook onto wheelchairs while others double as seats. What would a Gen Y supermarket look like?

• Scientists in New Zealand have invented a fruit sticker that changes colour when fruit is ripe. How about food packaging that changes colour when the food is off?

• The US department of Energy has suggested that oil companies think about adding perfumes to diesel fuel to cover up its foul smell. The odour of diesel is one of the main reasons why the fuel is not more popular, especially among female drivers. Meanwhile Bentley has created a branded smell to be applied to all new models (the smell of money presumably). Is there anyone out there with another smelly product that could be made to smell sweeter?

• A UK company is the first car insurance company to publicly admit using lie detection technology to reduce false claims. The DigiLog ‘voice stress analysis’ technology analyses a caller’s voice looking for stress indicators such as raised voice tone (lying creates stress that affects blood pressure which in turn narrows the larynx).

• With a touch of sublime insight, an Australian department store (David Jones) put a breast cancer-screening clinic in its lingerie department. Where could you put a screening unit for prostrate cancer?

• Mitsubishi has developed a product called the i-glass. This is a wineglass with an embedded microchip and radio frequency coil in its base that sends a message to the bar when your glass is empty.

• First came the self-heating sake can in Japan. Now a South Korean entrepreneur has invented the world’s first self-cooling can. Self-heating and self-cooling drink cans have been done, so what else could the idea be applied to? How about hot (or cold) face or hand cloths in a can?

• How can you stop graffiti on the railways? One solution, adopted by the Newcastle Metro in England, is to play 24-hour classical music on station platforms. A similar idea would presumably work if you played rap music to get rid of anyone over the age of 40.

• Corus Steel in the UK has produced what it claims is the world’s first square tin (which looks a bit like the old Spam tins to anyone old enough to remember). The benefit of the new tins is that they use 20% less space than conventional round tins.

• A Japanese company (the Fuji Spinning Company), has launched a range of vitamin enhanced clothing. Each garment has added extracts of seaweed and caffeine, which are supposed to make you thinner by massaging your bottom. Other smart clothes include T-shirts with added vitamin C and vitamin enchanced underwear. On a more serious note (but not much), other clothing companies are producing business suits that block electromagnetic radiation (from cellphones) and stress reducing clothes impregnated with aromatherapy oils.

• Police in Stoke-on-Trent in England are being asked to do all their paperwork in fully marked police cars outside the houses of regular criminals.