In my previous post, I have clarified the difference between incremental and disruptive innovation.

In this post let’s explore how you can jump-start disruptive innovation within your organisation.

To achieve sustainable growth, you need to think creatively about your product and/or service.

Despite the significant investment many companies place in collecting and analysing Big Data, creative thinking starts by forgetting data rather than accumulating it. In other words, the starting point for creative thinking has a qualitative rather than a quantitative nature.

You can think about a particular customer of yours, but you can’t do that with all of your clients at once.

To think, you need to detach yourself from all the details and look past through them.

What do you do when a friend asks your feedback on a movie? To generate an opinion, you must forget most of the film and recall few scenes that will form your judgement.

The same is true in business. To think creatively you need to forget; you need to free yourself from the burden of the last product you have developed and look at it from a different perspective, and this is perhaps the biggest challenge you as a manager and innovator face.

To make this process more visual, I have created a simple visual template.

You can download here an editable .pdf copy of the 'Forgetting your product template', and share it with your colleagues.

Business strategy visualisation is of great help to those companies willing to start a disrupting innovation agenda to grow sustainably.

To use the template correctly keep the description of your current product and the new idea short and to the point.

Also, remember that a new idea is not a substitute for your existing product or service. A new idea only aims at opening up new conversations around possible growth initiatives by suggesting new possibilities for value creation.

How many new ideas have been discussed in your team lately? Have they been visualised in any form?