In a recent article in a national magazine the five steps were listed in the context that all you had to do was take these five steps to be on the path to riches and glory. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Step 1: Involve customers in your ideation. Form customer idea advisory boards? identify early adopters so you can get in on the ground floor?

Simple right? Creating an advisory board with customers who are competitors is nearly impossible, besides having legal concerns, what company is going to reveal an idea that will also benefit their competitor? None! It is much better to work one-on-one with a company than as a group. Working with early adopters has it pluses and minuses. There are many companies who are early adopters but never seem to make the leap to early majority, but instead have moved on to the next new thing without fully realizing the benefits of their initial efforts.

Step 2: Involve customers in new ways… use methods of understanding the customer in non-traditional ways for your industry.

Ethnography is the studying/observing of people in their real environment to determine what they really do instead of just asking them. Make sure that you use a trained ethnographic expert instead of yourself; it is amazing what an expert will reveal. However, remember this method of idea generation is exploratory market research and needs to be reinforced with additional confirmatory type studies.

Step 3: Focus on the unarticulated needs of the customer… generating ideas of things customers do not know exist or need.

Customers are of little help in defining ideas of things they do not know. The Walkman, iPod, the internet, the paint jug… The reality is that these types of disruptive or radical ideas are much more difficult to identify and requires shifting through many more ideas to find the next new-new thing. Transformation, consolidation, aggregation of current frustrations and values of users are some of the major methods to identify new ideas.

But one thing is very certain, unless you have an ongoing effort of idea generation you will have to be very lucky to catch lighting in a jar.

Step 4: Involve suppliers in your product innovation. Use your suppliers’ innovation capability to help you.

This sounds very attractive, free innovation but it may come at a high price. Unless you can achieve some sort of exclusive arrangement or other special arrangement, it is the nature of all suppliers to sell your idea to your competitors the same (their) innovation. Remember a vendor is not your friend and wants to sell more of his products. Therefore your innovation advantage evaporates. There is a lot to be said for the Steve Job’s approach of internal innovation at Apple Corporation to protect their innovation.

Step 5: Benchmark ideation techniques to determine the best ones. Establish methods that encourage you to constantly search for new methods of understanding future innovation needs.

However it is more than just benchmarking, trying to understand each ideation method. There is value in determining how well your efficiency and productivity is in the search for innovative ideas. How much money are you investing? What has been your return on innovation (ROI)? What methods have worked for you and in what context? Different methods of ideation work best for different objectives. For incremental line extensions, close customer contact and involvement is an excellent innovation method. At the other extreme, new to the world innovation requires futurist visionary innovation techniques. Make sure you use the right innovation tool for the right job; misuse normally leads to very disappointing results.

In summary, Idea Innovation is hard work. The knowledgeable and skillful use of the different innovation tools is important. But paramount is the commitment to having an on-going pro-active innovation ideation process that is 24/7 day-in and day-out.