Table of Contents, How To Innovate and Win In Business

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Westside Toastmasters is located in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, California - Westside Toastmasters on Meetup

Exercise

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Despite the provocative question on the previous page, this exercise is not really going to tell you if you're insane. (The most I can help you there is to repeat what a friend once told me: 'If you think you are, you probably aren't.' Or was that the other way around!) But this will help illustrate your style of approaching new problems.

Imagine you've been hired to create a new brand of tennis shoe and given absolute freedom to do anything you want. Right now, before you read any further, use the space on this page to roughly sketch its appearance and list its features.

What was the first thing you did when faced with this problem? Did you think about the sneakers you already own? List categories of shoes and work within those? Picture existing brands and duplicate their styles and innovations?

Or did you try to look at the sneaker in a new way? Imagine a new demographic, or try to figure out what an existing demo- graphic wants and isn't getting? Devise features no sneaker has had before?

When you look to the past for the solutions to problems like this, or if your starting point is to accept the parameters of what's already been done to solve them, you limit your potential for innovation.