If you want to build space for thinking how to change the game, try these prompts in a leadership meeting, planning session, or strategy day. If you are a solopreneur, try them in a journal or a thinking walk.
“What Are We Copying from competitors Without Realising?”
List the last ten changes you made because the market seemed to demand them.
How many were genuine customer insight versus competitor response?
“Where Are We Competing on the Same Variables as Everyone Else?”
Identify the factors buyers use to compare multiple suppliers of your product or service. If your differentiation sits entirely inside those factors, you are in a red-ocean fight.
“What Does the Customer Have to Do That They Should Not Have to Do?”
Map the customer effort required to get value. Any step that is confusing, repetitive, or high-effort is an opening for a different proposition.
“What Are We Not Allowed to Say?”
Every market has taboos, things people do not challenge. Those taboos are often where the rules are hiding.
Related Journal Insights
Fail fast everyone says. Often offered as a cure-all for uncertainty but I find this is unhelpful advice for many small businesses
Testing ideas, trying new approaches, and learning from what happens are all essential. Without experimentation, innovation remains theoretical. But experimentation on its own is not innovation.
Businesses can end up trapped in a game: a sole focus on winning is often the enemy of creating new value.
A favoured quote from Professor Jean-Paul Carvalho of the University of Oxford, speaking on the critical role technology has always played in the history of human innovations.
Many of these theoretical frameworks are both older than many realise, and influence us more than we might think.
Despite an abundance of ideas, innovation rarely survives contact with day-to-day delivery. Most ideas fade, stall, or remain half-formed. They sit in notebooks, voice memos, or the back of the founder’s mind, revisited occasionally but never quite acted on.