Within, Adjacent, and Beyond is about partnering: something that’s very critical to success with innovation today, to mitigate your risk and to share the reward.

Partnering is something that everyone talks about doing, but rarely gets creative about. We use a technique at futurethink called “Within, Adjacent , and Beyond,” and here’s how it works when it comes to partnering:

Sit down with your team and think about a product or service that could really use a partnership from the outside to really take it to the next level, and then think about “Within”. Who are the partners within your industry, even your competitors, that could take you to the next level?

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In the last few decades, collaboration and brainstorming have reigned supreme. Private offices were redesigned as open workplans with zero privacy. Lingo like “teamwork” and “team player” moved from the locker room into the conference room. The prevailing belief was that to promote a culture of innovation and creativity, you must create a collaborative environment.

Not-So-Perfect Brainstorm
However, recent compelling research suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And, according to a handful of prominent psychologists, the most creative people in many fields are often introverted. Several studies show that group brainstorming can actually block the brain’s ability to solve problems and generate novel ideas.

Do Not Disturb
These studies were cited in author Susan Cain's article in the New York Times challenging the “groupthink” mentality. Privacy, she claims, makes us more productive, more creative, and even helps us learn. Decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups, and figures like Apple’s engineering genius Steve Wozniak are advising people to “work alone...not on a committee. Not on a team.”

Make It a Hybrid

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This Innovation QuickWin is designed to help teams reverse the assumptions that they have around existing products or services and get them out of the mindset of what can’t happen and start to think about what can.

Next time, before a brainstorm, try this as a warm-up exercise. Get people into a room and maybe pair them up in teams of two or three. Give them everyday objects that they interact with all the time e.g. a paperclip, or a pair of scissors, or a marker; you get the idea.

Give them this challenge: let them know that the R&D group has just presented them with this new product and that it’s their job in the next 10 minutes to name it, come up with its benefits, and the audience that they would sell it to.

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This Innovation QuickWin will teach you an effective way to scan for change by following smart people. 

One way to get ahead of business trends is to schedule time during your week to learn how to identify and monitor changes that are reshaping society. There are many ways to scan for change, but one way that we recommend is to follow smart, passionate people. There’s no substitute for following individuals that are informed, and that can broaden our perspective and simplify complex issues. 

So where do we find these people? One way is to look towards curated programs such as TED Talks, PopTech, and FORA.tv. You can also follow futurethink’s Twitter feed (@futurethinktank) to see who we’re following online.

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This Innovation QuickWin is called "Plus 3, Minus 3" and it's a great tool to help you consider incremental innovations to your existing products or services.

For example, let's say we want to improve these headphones. I'm going to explore three things that I can add to them to create more value and three things that I can remove from them to create more value. 

The adding part is easy -- what can I add to them? I can put a GPS device in them, which will enable me to find these headphones if I lose them. I can also add a noise-canceling feature that would allow me to enjoy my music even better. I can also add a volume control onto these headphones so I can control them without having to deal with my phone. 

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The envelope please...

Chief Learning Officer magazine recently hosted the Fall 2011 Symposium, titled “Game-Changing Learning: Development for the New Normal,” at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel in California. At this leader-studded event, futurethink was a nominee for a Learning in Practice Award, whose past recipients have included IBM and Rosetta Stone.

The nomination acknowledged our company’s achievement in “content,” a category in which we are continuously innovating. This year, we rolled out a well-received Webinar series on critical innovation topics; launched a set of short video clips called Innovation QuickWins; introduced an iPad apps resource list; and expanded our resource library to include the Killer Queries Idea Generation Tool.

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This Innovation QuickWin is about where next year will take you. For many people, you are well into your budget-planning season or your strategic-planning season. It should be a time of great inspiration for all of us. Unfortunately, it’s BORING. So let’s take strategic planning and turn it on its head. Here are a few tips on how to really challenge yourself in the upcoming year. 

Try this:

First of all, FOCUS. Rather than a laundry list of all the things you’re going to achieve, what is your No. 1 goal and why? Challenge yourself to spend some time thinking about this. 

Second, INSPIRATION. Too often our PowerPoint decks are laden with jargon: what vision or cause is tied to your business or product that makes it truly different? And, how can you articulate it in a way that really inspires people? Better yet, take a page from the playbook of other leading innovators and articulate your vision or inspiration in a picture, in a video, or in a story or narrative that really brings your strategic plan to life.

The ultimate litmus test for your strategic plan will come at this time next year, when you look at your strategic plan, and realize that you have to create a new one because you have achieved all of your goals.

Three dimensional printers are moving from the lab to the marketplace using technology that could redefine the very concepts of craftsmanship, engineering, and accessibility. As with any emerging technology, 3D printing comes with its share of controversy: the potential to infringe on patented designs or “print” weapon components has raised serious legal and ethical questions. Should certain applications of 3D printing be restricted?

Here are a few ways that companies have “pushed the envelope” on 3D printing capabilities: 

3D Gets Medical
An early-stage experiment at the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine is addressing the shortage of organ donors with a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. Using scanners and a small tissue sample, a 3D image of a patient’s kidney is created and a computerized process “prints” layers of living tissue that can be fused together. While patients will benefit from more immediate access, how will doctors and insurance companies accommodate this new realm of medicine?

3D Gets Edible
The French Culinary Institute and Cornell University are experimenting with a 3D food printer that brings an unparalleled level of precision into the kitchen. Upload a blueprint for a cake design, fill the cartridges with icing, and hit print. The result is an intricate and delicious piece of technology that could be available to consumers in the near future. Will self-printed cakes become the fad, making pastry chefs a thing of the past?

3D Gets Mass-Market

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Over the last few years, we have been tracking the trend of video usage in the workplace. Organizations in every industry are steadily embracing on-demand streaming video for training, HR, marketing, and executive meetings. From YouTube to the classroom to the cubicle, video technology is revolutionizing the way learning is delivered, supported, and enhanced.

One video success story that made headlines involved a hedge-fund manager who offered to tutor his young cousin in math via remote video. When the cousin’s grades skyrocketed, other family members asked him to post the tutoring sessions on YouTube. He gained thousands of loyal viewers and eventually received cash infusions from Bill Gates and Google, which enabled him to found the Khan Academy.

Here at futurethink, we realized our clients and subscribers could benefit from short video clips of our innovation insights, and we are pleased to announce the launch of our newest product: Innovation QuickWins. Through 60-second videos, we deliver innovation tips and tricks in a medium that suits different learning styles and paces. Our QuickWin videos will keep innovation at the forefront of your teams’ minds and offers them new ways to achieve quick, satisfying results.

To experience the future, sign up now to receive our bi-weekly video innovation tips.