getting a fresh perspective: helping you see the wood for the trees

Innovation, and product development is inevitably a risky exercise. There are high levels of uncertainty. There is a risk your endeavours may not be successful. There are frequently times when you simply get ‘stuck’.
Whilst having a great team around you can help you get over many obstacles, there are times when even that doesn’t help. Sharing the same experiences, carrying the same baggage and operating with similar constraints means internal support only gets you so far.
So what’s the answer? In this age of Open Innovation, the “not invented here” syndrome should no longer be a ‘thing’, with many companies receptive to seeking outside support, and appreciating the many benefits of obtaining a fresh perspective:

• Sounding board – If you’re caught up in the technology or product development, it is very easy to convince yourself that black is white despite evidence to the contrary. External support can help you explore your situation, talk things over or think about things in new ways
• No baggage or ties to ‘conventional wisdom’ – just because it’s not been possible in your industry, does not mean a particular problem hasn’t been solved elsewhere. A fresh perspective may help to identify new approaches, sources of inspiration or ways of doing things you haven’t thought of before
• Impartiality – external support should come without existing loyalties to solutions or approaches. Being able to “tell it how it is” rather than tow the party line means you won’t hang on to bad ideas for as long
• Structuring complex questions more clearly – taking a step back and approaching a problem or question in a different way helps to restructure the issue, providing clarity of thought
• Being asked the questions you never ask yourself – what have you not thought of asking or have avoided asking?! Getting a fresh perspective on these areas might be crucial in making progress
• Getting external insights to help answer your questions - what do your customers think? How about other stakeholders and influencers? What could you achieve if you had access to external insights to help shape your internal programmes?
• Additional resource - everyone is always too busy, right?

So, in what ways can external support help you? Well we have provided support where our clients

• needed to get insights and opinion from current or potential customers. What’s working and what’s not working? How could the relationship be improved for the benefit of both parties? Obtaining external insights in an impartial way (and providing anonymity to the customers as well) enabled the client to make decisions about new approaches to customer engagement
• needed to understand the extent of receptivity to new technology, and whether there would be enough interest to make it successful. Again, obtaining anonymous and impartial insights helped shape not just the decision about whether to execute or not, but also helped to define the value proposition
• had a technical product objective without a clearly defined roadmap to the solution. By taking a step back, we could approach the question differently, provide a structure to the project and help to better define how to explore, evaluate and ultimately develop appropriate solutions
• were early stage start-ups, and we were able to provide a challenge to their thinking, helping to better define their market, customer, positioning and so on as they developed their ideas

In all these cases, being able to take a step back, think about a problem or question differently, and provide a fresh perspective on the issue helped us to help our clients to see the wood for the trees and make progress for themselves and for their organisation.