Asking the Right Questions Is Key to Data Collection
As author Edward Hodnett noted, “If you don’t ask the right questions, you don’t get the right answers. A question asked in the right way often points to its own answer. Asking questions is the A-B-C of diagnosis. Only the inquiring mind solves problems.”

Camp Invention Challenges Youth to Innovate and Create
Camp Invention is a hands-on academic enrichment program designed to inspire students in science, mathematics, history and the arts. It offers elementary students an opportunity to solve complex problems and develop solutions through innovation.

Discover Customer Needs With Ethnography
The provider that best satisfies customers’ unmet needs may be deemed the most innovative, and is likely to win the biggest share of the market. Practitioners often use voice-of-the-customer (VOC) techniques to find the specifications clients seek.

Evaluate – and Solve – Your Problem Through 9 Windows
One common roadblock to innovation is the inability to define the problem that needs to be solved – real situations can be complex. Nine windows, or the system operator, can help cut through the complexity so that the problem becomes clear.

Improve Product Design: Watch What End Users Do
The beginning of any design and development project should include activities aimed at a deep understanding of user behavior. Planning a design that facilitates likely user tasks will succeed in minimizing frustration and reducing user abandonment.

Minimize Uncertainty with Robust Decisions
Making a robust decision early in the innovation process is essential to transform the innovation into successful actions. First, find the alternative that is the least sensitive to noise (uncertainty) and then bring the design to its performance target.

Retain Customers: Align ‘Moments of Truth’ with VOC
A company wishing to retain customers should complete a two-phase process: 1) determine what is important to the customers during “moments of truth” and 2) make sure their organization is capable of filling those needs reliably.

Reveal Assumptions and Find Root Causes with Webbing
Similar to the 5 Whys, webbing encourages practitioners to ask a web of questions about a task or process in order to break down assumptions and find new solutions.

Six Sigma and Innovation: Natural Partners from the Start
Combining innovation and Six Sigma is just the beginning of the story. Six Sigma also guides the innovation forward through implementation as facts and measures drive concept selection, deployment planning, performance optimization and control.

Systematic Innovation’s Successes in Healthcare
Systematic innovation is being applied to many industries with great results. Two healthcare case studies address the wide fields of applicability for strategic and systematic innovation

Ten Steps for Boosting Your Firm’s Innovation
If you thought turning your company into an innovation powerhouse was a complex and painful task, think again! Here are ten simple steps you can take to turn your company into an innovation leader.

What Not To Do: Ten Ways to Inhibit Innovation
Directors, vice presidents and managers have much more power than they realize. They can patiently create a climate of creativity or they can crush it with subtle comments and gestures. Their actions send powerful signals.

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