This issue's example is featured in my latest white paper: Start With What You Have: Your Fastest Track to Profitable Growth.  For more ideas and examples, get the full white paper by clicking on the link at the end of the article.

 

A potato product manufacturer faced a tough innovation challenge: how do you come up with anything new in the area of “frozen products made of potato that you can buy in a supermarket”? 

 

On the face of it, this was not an area ripe for new ideas. 

 

Internal people thought they knew all the angles in this business, and weren’t particularly open to hearing anything new (it wasn’t arrogance, they just didn’t think there was anything new to hear). 

Aided by, among others, my colleague Jack Martin Leith, the company held large-group meetings with consumers. The company DID NOT set the agenda. They let the consumers do that.

They also invited key internal people as ‘witnesses’. The witnesses were asked to listen to the consumers. Without interrupting! 

That was tough.

But to their surprise, the witnesses gained all kinds of insights about how their products were viewed, and they came up with a range of new ideas, two of which became high-selling profitable new products.
 

Some of the most resistant internal people were highly enthused by the approach and became vociferous champions for these new initiatives. We’ve had fantastic results using similar approaches in both B2B and B2C situations (There's an introduction to the large-group technique in my eBook: "Seven Keys to Releasing Potential" - link at the bottom of the article).