Tips to Creating and Using Innovation Platforms
When brainstorming ideas for new products, it’s useful to have interesting starting points for ideation. Innovation platforms are a great way to inspire breakthrough ideas to extend your brand.
As I mentioned in my blog post about How to Innovate, brand extensions should always start with the brand idea or brand vision. If you have a very narrow brand idea, then perhaps you don’t need to create innovation platforms. You may just need some really interesting stimulus to help you think of new ideas for your brand. If, however, you are aiming to build a pipeline of products for a brand with a broad vision it’s pretty tough to do without providing a more tangible starting point. That’s where innovation platforms come in.
So what is an innovation platform? An innovation platform is a creative jumping off point that goes deeper into an area your brand would like to capitalize on. It dimensionalizes the area in a variety of ways to spark new thinking and new ideas.
Let me explain this by using an example. If you are a maker of colored pens, and you have a particular following among Creative Professsionals, perhaps you articulate your vision to become the brand that makes ‘Tools for Unleashing Creativity.’ I’m not advocating that any pen maker can do this. In my hypothetical case, there is equity among the target audience that will allow the brand to stretch into new tools for creativity.
So what do you do with a broad area like Unleashing Creativity? You create platforms that help you further define an area. So under Unleashing Creativity, you might find more granular areas that can serve as inspiration. Here are a few that might fit under ‘Unleashing Creativity’:
“Communal Electricity”: What happens when a group of people come together? Something electric happens. Creativity is unleashed and art is inspired. Think: mosh pit, Burning Man, community art projects, flash mobs, music festivals
“Improvisation”: It’s the freedom to riff and go with the flow. One word inspires another, one note inspires another, one gesture inspires another. Think: Second City, Jazz music, dancing, Jackson Pollock
“Design is in the details”: What sets apart the amateurs from the experts? It’s the details - the intricacy of design and the painstaking time and effort that goes into a creative endeavor. Think: photo realism, Rolex watches, the New York Philharmonic, New Yorker feature articles, tiny homes
“Abstraction”: A box that looks like a cake, a vase that looks like a violin – it’s just the indication of something that tells the story. Art is in the imagination. Think: Cubism, David Lynch movies, modular functional furniture, poetry
There are many more platforms that you could come up with if you continued to go deeper. So now what? Eventually you will have a great list of platforms that you will need to evaluate and hone. Here are a few tips to creating effective Innovation Platforms:
Look to see if the platforms are too narrow or too broad. If you can think of at least 10 ideas under each of your innovation platform areas, that’s a good sign that the area is robust enough. But make sure that these platforms are not too broad. If there is an overabundance of ideas that originate from a platform, then think about breaking it into two or more distinct platforms. This will result in better ideas in the long-run.
Make sure that your platforms have nothing to do with the product you are selling. If you notice, none of the above-mentioned platforms is related to Pens. That’s the point. If you only create your platforms based on ‘putting ink on a piece of paper,’ your ideation will be very limited. If you think outside of your category and get inspired thinking from places like music, art, culture, brands, people, etc., you will stretch your thinking and come up with more interesting ideas.
Bring your platform to life visually. It’s helpful to create a mood board for your platform so that others will understand the tonality of the platform. Is it energetic or serene? Is it spontaneous or planned? Is it colorful or moody? Picking great visuals will evoke a feeling and stimulate thinking. It will spark conversations, which may lead to new and unexplored ideas.
Use behavioral-analogs and cultural icons to contextualize your platform. It’s helpful to come up some ideas on how the platform might be expressed. I gave some examples above of how each platform might be expressed in culture – like flash fobs and Jackson Pollack. Flash mobs captures the energy of what happens when people get together (platform: Communal Electricity). It’s entertaining and unpredictable, and it’s hard not to get caught up in that feel good vibe. Jackson Pollock’s art has an unfettered aspect to it (platform: Improvisation). When Pollock created his large lyrical paintings, he stood above the canvas with a paintbrush, and let the muse take over.
Once you create you innovation platforms, create a briefing tool for each platform to use in a brainstorming session. This is likely to take the form of a poster board to facilitate team discussion, or handouts if the teams are small. Using the stimulus created for a platform, you can then instruct a team to come up with as many ideas for a given area as possible.
Let’s say we are on a team ideating on the ‘Design is in the Details’ platform. How many ideas can you come up with in this Platform? Here’s my one-minute brainstorm session: How about a pen that can do fine lines, medium and thick lines with the click of button? What if there was an app that follows an artist or writer’s progress through a project? How about a digital paint brush that lets you get an exact Pantone color? I’d continue brainstorming with my team members until our time limit and then prioritize the best ideas. We’ll have some great ideas that we would consider writing up into concepts to test with consumers.
Using innovation platforms is a great way to get inspiration for your new product development efforts. When innovation platforms are used correctly, they can inspire great ideas that may eventually lead to that million-dollar brand extension. Happy ideating!
