Lenses for Innovation Hacking - Gary Hamel

James Todhunter's post on his blog led me to Prof. Gary Hamel's Management 2.0 article on Innovation Hacker

Interesting Gary says four lenses that are needed to come out of the "fog of what is" - these are and I quote Gary -

1. Unchallenged orthodoxies—the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities.
2. Underleveraged competencies—the “invisible” assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms
3. Underappreciated trends—the nascent discontinunities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones.
4. Unarticulated needs—the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address.

Well, these are interesting questions, however, the methods to get to other side of fog, really need to be experimented with. My comments posted at the site, I am reproducing below,


Dear Prof. Hamel.

I think the operating phrase is "anyone who is genuinely eager to “see differently.” ". I have been teaching various techniques, methods, methodologies as well as practicing these techniques in overcoming all the 4 U's that you mentioned over the years.

And I think it is clear, not all just start using it in their daily grind. They like every such workshop, seminar, and new techniques - but is it really a few who are as you said genuinely eager to see differently, who get up and start taking it forward. I dont really see any large company CEOs really fall in that category - really - as they have become large only by repeating what they have doing for decades - the scale-up process. So far the world was not changing as fast, as it does nowadays, - Now it is unavoidable for anyone to not to be geneuinely eager to see differently. May be the eyes need to be reinforced with diferent lenses. I have been experimenting so far and I think three clear winners are seen Lean Thinking from Toyota, TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) and finally Systems Thinking. I call it the LIST (Lean Inventive System Thinking) framework - in contrast to our long running Analogical thinking. You can get more info on LIST at http://www.aitriz.org/ai/index.php?page=2008/trizcon2008&article=pre_post_conference

I came to this article from James Todhunter's blog http://www.innovatingtowin.com/innovating_to_win/2008/01/pervasive-innov.html


- Posted by Navneet Bhushan
January 16, 2008 00:54