Combinatorial Innovation: two birds, one creative stone
Spotlight on:
Leveraging existing products and services for business growth
As the economy tightens, we're all looking for growth opportunities. I'm trying to avoid talking about AI, but with its extraordinary influence on business right now it's virtually impossible. If you zoom out and look at all the new AI apps and solutions, they’re essentially the same pattern repeating — and it’s working.
Alberto Savoia talks about Combinatorial Innovation — combining two ideas to create a new solution. All (most) new ideas are combinations of existing ideas, products or services with new technology applied, and AI is the perfect current example.
Take a spell checker and add AI? You
get Autocomplete or Grammarly. AI and images? Canva auto-generated images. AI and Notes? Writing suggestions and chatbots applied to your ideas. You get the picture.
Now, consider how this applies to your company. What existing products or services can you combine with new technology or new partners to create more value for your customers? It doesn't have to be AI — you just need to keep it simple! 😁
These are just some examples of Combinatorial Innovation success:
If you want to leverage Combinatorial Innovation in your business, these are the things you need to be thinking about:
What do you sell?
Who are your partners or suppliers?
What new technology is available?
What has changed in your favour? (For example, COVID driving the acceptance of remote work!)
Combine these, pretotype them using the infiltrator method, and pick a winner!
Our guide to Simple Innovation is here!
It's time to revolutionise the way your business innovates by embedding rapid experimentation into your innovation processes. Ready to get started? Download our guide to find out more!
A big thank you to Juan Ramón Sánchez Velar, a member of our Pretotyping Slack community and one of our latest Learn Pretotyping graduates! He recently wrote a fantastic blog post on why people need to start pretotyping, giving a special mention to our online course and Alberto Savoia’s The Right It.
