The heart of innovation is about coming up with new ideas that you did not have before. This is critical to do in today’s business world where you are constantly required to come up with new ideas to address problems in your company. Furthermore, you may be tasked to come up with new ideas for products and services as well. If you think about all the new ideas you have come up with in the past, maybe around half worked and half didn’t. But statistically the bigger the idea the more likely it is to fail. For instance, depending on the year and field, anywhere from 70% to 95% of new product launches fail and around 75% of all venture capital backed start-ups fail. The people involved in these failures all thought they had great ideas and then invested a lot effort and money to implement them. But clearly there was a disconnect between their ideas and what actually could be successful. The reason they failed is because they did not have a cognitive process for generating ideas.
This may seem like a blanket oversimplification. But I believe it to be accurate and so did a man named Edwards Deming. He was a renowned engineer, professor and consultant who lived by a very powerful phrase, which was: “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
So based on this dynamic, if you don’t have a process to come up with new ideas and are just doing it incidentally then, simply by default, you don’t know what you’re doing. Hence the high rate of innovation failure throughout all fields. OIsource.com was launched to change this dynamic. We teach entrepreneurs and corporate teams a cognitive process that develops their skill to innovate. This is done through an exercise that enables you to intentionally originate, interconnect and validate ideas so they have the best chance to be successful. We call this exercise the ITP, which stands for Innovative Thinking Process.
The ITP is comprised of a rigorous mental and writing activity, which puts you in situations that challenge you to think differently. It is a demanding, self-directed, solitary endeavor. Modern research studies are beginning to show that this type of isolated thinking is the most productive form of thinking: https://www.inc.com/melissa-schilling/the-science-of-why-brainstorming-in-groups-doesnt-work Nikolai Tesla understood this even in his time when he noted: “Originality thrives in seclusion, free of outside influences…”.
The ITP is therefore the complete opposite of the interaction within group ideation sessions you may be used to. But after going through the ITP is when you should participate in a group ideation session. At that point you will have a thorough and deep understanding of the validity and relevance of your new ideas. At that point, you are much better prepared for the group ideation session and it can become more productive and impactful for all parties involved.
The ITP was derived from an advanced new paradigm on the brain/mind dynamic. We call this new way of looking at your mind and how it works; the Mind Model. It came from years of research within the fields of neuroscience, physics and philosophy, as well as insight from the methods of ideation, meditation and stoicism. The full documentation of this new paradigm is on OIsource.com. But the only place you can learn the practical application of this paradigm is in the ITP training experience. Contact us to find out how to make the ITP training work for you and your company.