The Four Lenses of Innovation
A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

Some would argue that innovation is the exclusive province of creative geniuses people like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson or Bill Gates. These are individuals for whom, it seems, innovation has always come naturally. Its as if these people are wired differently from the rest of us somehow they are able to intuitively spot opportunities that remain invisible to mere mortals or ordinary companies. But what if we could unpack the discovery process much more precisely by getting inside the mind of the innovator? What if we could open up that mysterious black box and take a good look at how it works? What if we could find out how radical innovators come up with their breakthrough ideas? Most importantly, what if we could actually reverse-engineer this process? The Four Lenses of Innovation describes a systematic methodology for generating breakthrough ideas that can be used across an entire organization to successfully create new growth opportunities. There are four essential perspectives four perceptual lenses that seem to dominate most successful innovation stories and that often characterize the entrepreneurs or companies behind them. In case after case, we find that the innovators came to their insights by: CHALLENGING ORTHODOXIES questioning deeply-held dogmas inside companies and inside industries about what drives success HARNESSING TRENDS spotting unnoticed patterns of trends which could substantially change the rules of the game LEVERAGING RESOURCES thinking of a company as a portfolio of skills and assets that can be recombined or stretched into new opportunities UNDERSTANDING NEEDS learning to live inside the customers skin, empathizing with unarticulated feelings and identifying unmet needs