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John Gerrie, the founder of KN3W IDEAS ® is not your typical innovation guru. He has lived with the real challenges of managing major global brands and businesses, with board or management committee responsibilities across 4 continents. He understands how innovation can drive a company’s success , and he also understands how often businesses can get bogged down and waste valuable resources picking the wrong ideas to work on. Most recently John was the head ‘ideas-guy’ at Reckitt Benckiser plc, a global consumer goods company with dominant market positions in over 60 countries with global brands like Dettol ®, Nurofen®, Mortein®, Lysol®, Harpic®, Vanish®, Airwick®, Woolite® Finish®, Gaviscon®, Lemsip® and many more. Reckitt have been the star performer in their sector, with double digit earning growth for the last 10 years driven by an innovation program that delivers close to 40% of its net revenue from products launched in the past 3 years. John was the architect of the Reckitt Benckiser front -end of innovation process, and led an ideas team that delivered over £750m in new product ideas annually. Since leaving Reckitt Benckiser, John has been researching and testing a new approach to the front-end of innovation. A more reliable and consistent way of find ing the right things to do, with less wastage working on the wrong things. And working on the wrong things is not that uncommon. Several major studies and John’s own experience confirms that on average about 45% of the projects in most company’s innovation pipeline are the wrong ideas, ideas that will never make it to market, or will fail after launch. And the reason is simple; We start with an idea. So often under pressure to come up with the big idea, we jump to conclusions, we think we understand how the idea will appeal to the customer, without really understanding what the customer needs, or more importantly, what problems the customer wants to solve. Fixedness. Like it or not, our thinking is inadvertently limited by our experience, our environment and our beliefs. This human phenomenon is sometimes labelled paradigms, stuckedness or fixedness – “a psychological inertia that prevents us from being able to easily see new ideas and solutions beyond our experiences, knowledge and beliefs” We simply do not use the whole organisations brain. Why? Human nature, egos and competition. More often it is the way we work, particularly in typical brainstorming sessions where often the loudest voice dominates and the more introverted participants are left without being heard. The KN3W IDEAS process helps organisation s not only to think differently, but to think together to pick the right ideas earlier in the innovation process so that valuable resources are not wasted working on the wrong ideas. KN3W IDEAS combines the best elements across a wide variety of innovation theory and techniques into one easy to use process, all driven through a set of patent-pending templates and tools. John’s book “Solving the Right Problems with the Right Ideas” not only explain s the theory behind KN3W IDEAS it contains valuable case studies and a complete set of the tools and templates, plus a full tutorial to get you started. KN3W IDEAS also runs regular 1day “Introduction to KN3W IDEAS” training, and 3day “Live-action KN3W IDEAS works hops” which can be customised for any organisation. KN3W IDEAS is building a network of accredited facilitators and partners. If you are interested contact KN3W IDEAS at info@KN3W-IDEAS.com or call +61 2 99862615 Solving the Right Problems with the Right Ideas TM That is why KN3W IDEAS starts with the problem not the idea. By getting behind the issues in the business and into the heads of your customer the KN3W IDEAS process uncovers the right problems to solve. That is why KN3W IDEAS uses systematic problem solving and not brainstorming. The KN3W IDEAS systematic problem solving technique has its foundations in TRIZ, and identifies the blocking and enabling factors and the contradiction present in any dilemma, and then uses a set of twelve operators to trigger thinking that is not limited by fixedness. That is why KN3W IDEAS uses a patent pending tool kit containing a set of templates and tools designed to get people thinking together, in an environment where everyone has their own thinking space, but experience s, ideas and thinking are shared. Main Template Prioritisation Matrix Task Selection Dice Task Templates
