Franziska: Hi and welcome back to the Basic Bananas TV. Today I’ve got a very special guest with me, Nils Vesk.

Nils: How are you doing guys?

Franziska: Now Nils is here to talk about, basically he’s an innovation architect and I asked him if he could come along and share with you a little bit about how you can think a little bit more innovatively and how you can look at you business and ask yourselves a few questions that you can use to innovate basically. Do you have some tips? I think you do.

Nils: No pressure at all. I’ve got some tips. I was having a bit of think about this just before as to what might be useful to you when you’re working in small business. I think the most important space and place that we can start when it comes to looking at innovating and organization is to look at how we can generate insights.

What an insight in many ways is all about is it’s like not the ideas itself, but it’s the thinking behind where we’re actually going to find our great million dollar idea. I often use the analogy that insight generation is a bit like going fishing with a depth sounder. It’s not going to catch the fish for you, but it’s going to go, “This sonar is saying there are fish down amongst us.”

A really good place to start … generating insights, the first part, is to look at something like what is it that our customers dislike about what it is that we do. That might be what do they dislike and all you have to do is put yourself in his shoes. Maybe they dislike the cost, your fees might be exorbitant to them, or it might not be, it might be a matter of time it takes for them to actually get the product from when they ordered it.

List as many of those dislikes as you can. That’s a really good place to start with. The other thing you can think of, and I think all businesses do this, is to just go over what are some of the basic needs that our customer has. Most businesses would already be ticking these things off, so you’ll find you wouldn’t be in business unless you’re satisfying some of those needs. That’s a really good place to start, but we can really differentiate from needs is to go into desires. That is, what is it that our clients or our customers would like on top of their needs?

It might be that they want to be confident. It might be that they want to be in style, they want to look like they’re in control, they want to feel smart, they want to have power. It might be that they just want to know.

Once you’ve got those, you going to have a list of all of those down and from your list, your job then is to say, “How do I turn all of these cool insights into commercial ideas that make lots of money?” The way we do that is a number of different ways for this, a couple what we call ideation or idea generation [inaudible 00:03:18] that we can use. A really good thing to do is just to start by asking, “What could we add or combine to an existing product or process or service that we’re doing that’s going to make it better?”

Could we add, let’s say I’ve got a lawn mowing business. What could I add when I turn up that’s going to add a little bit more value? Is it that I come with some fertilizer? Is it that I come with a cup of tea? Is it that I come with a guide on Azaleas and how to fertilize them? I don’t know, because it’s not my business, but what can we add or could we combine? That’s a really, really simple thing to do. What could we add or combine? Remember, these ideas are also trying to be based around satisfying these insights. Does it help to improve how we’re satisfying your need? Does it help to deal with what someone’s disliking?

The other thing you can do to create some great innovative thinking is to ask yourself, “What could you eliminate from something that you do?” We often don’t think about this, but what if we eliminated having to fill out complex contract forms? We took a contract that was twenty pages and we made it one page. What if we could eliminate having to meet face-to-face? It’s ridiculous, you remember some of the first banks that did that, like ING Bank and things like that, or what if we would have a circus without [inaudible 00:04:47]? That’s impossible. Cirque du Soleil. Really, really agitative questions. You want to go, “What if we get rid of that?” If you think it’s impossible, you say, “What would we need to do to make that happen?”

Innovation really mean just about experimenting for your business, so to do that, what we want to do is if you’ve got a new idea, let’s say for example, you wanted to do the idea of putting a signage board out there. You might go, “My god, It’s going to cost me [inaudible 00:05:13] to get that built and it’s a bit expensive.” You go, “I don’t want to go out and fork out all the big bucks just yet.” You go, “What’s my plan to test this?” You say, “What I’m going to do for starters is I’m just going to give a stack of brochures and I’m going to get some little things from office, some plastic little brochure container for $5 and I’m going to put it near the car or the front door. I’m going to do that at three of my jobs for three weeks and I’m going to count the number of things that I’m going to do and look at the number of sales and inquires I get.” That’s your plan. Plan your experiment.

The next thing that you want to do is predict. We’re going to have ten more sales, we’re going to find our income goes x much by that and we’re going to get so many different phone calls and inquiries because of that. Once we’ve done a prediction, we go out and we execute. We run this. We test it, we get the packet, the brochures printed, you stick it up. Also, I forgot to put cost here so it’s [inaudible 00:06:20] of how much money we’re going to spend and we execute it and we just measure everything out.

This happened, this happened, this happened and this happened. Record all the data. On Thursdays, no one took any and your brochures on Friday, half the brochures were gone. On Saturday we had to get a whole new stack printed, then we come back to what’s called evaluate. This is when we look at what we predicted. We predicted these things would happen, but in reality, when we ran this experiment, rather than getting three jobs or extra jobs, we got five jobs and we found that the budget was even bigger than what we did. We use this what we call to learn what we can improve or change or modify or substitute, eliminate, and sort.

The thing about this experimentation is it never stops. The scientist doesn’t go, “I’ve got the Nobel Peace Prize. I got to win first prize.” They move on to the next experiment and what it is, is it’s a cyclical process. You go from one experiment to the next experiment to the next experiment.

Franziska: High five. Thank you so much. Thanks again for listening. This was a little bit of a longer tip, but so valuable, so I really appreciate you coming here and sharing this with us. I will post below also the link to go and check out Nils’, so you can go have a look at Nils’ publishes. Is it a Worldly Magazine?

Nils: Worldly Magazine, yeah.

Franziska: Worldly Magazine that is very valuable and a few are his bits and pieces of his website so I’ll share that below. Thanks again for watching. Actually, should we give them a challenge?

Nils: A challenge?

Franziska: A challenge, yeah. Let’s just come up with one. Basically what I’ll get you to do, and he can say if this is a good idea. I’ll get you to look at any area of your business, so you pick one area of your business. It could be a product, a service, a process in your business and you pick one, and use this framework here, that Neil’s just shared with you and you’re going to come up with lots of ideas and then you just post one of them. What’s one thing that you could do to innovate one of these three things and then we’ll see. Do you like that one?

Nils: Good idea. I think that’s a good idea, but challenge yourself maybe to come up with not with just one idea, even though you might want to share ones, to say, “A five year old could probably come up with ten ideas.” The number of techniques that we’ve got and the number of insights that you find [crosstalk 00:08:48].

Franziska: The idea that you share only one. Let’s do it. Thank so much, thanks again for watching and we’ll see you in the next video