InnovatorsDigest

New "88 Great Meeting Planning Questions" Book Helps Innovators Plan Successful Events

Now You Can Ask More & Better Questions to Plan Better Meetings & Events.

Get the new 88 Great Meeting Planning Questions by Gerald "Solutionman" Haman. It contains 88 Great Questions you need to get started in planning great meetings, events, conferences, conventions, tradeshows, workshops, seminars facilitations, retreats and experiences!

People spend a lot of time attending meetings, but they seldom have enough time and help to effectively plan the meetings. During the past 20 years, the author, Gerald "Solutionman" Haman, attended, planned and facilitated meetings for hundreds of small groups and large audiences of several thousand people. As a result of those experiences, he developed these 88 Great Questions in this 10-page booklet to help people plan better meetings and events. 

Here is a preview of the book's Table of Contents that reveals the 12 question topics:

 
Order from Amazon.com or directly from Haman's company, SolutionPeople Innovation.
Save 50% by ordering downloadable eBook for only $8.88 (only 10 cents per question)from SolutionPeople by clicking HERE. 

Order a printed booklet from Amazon.com for $18.88 (only 21 cents per question) by clicking HERE.

 

The Best Question to Be Asked by An Innovator

For over a decade, I've been asking people, "What's your favorite question to be asked by innovative people?" I've studied hundreds of responses and the trend is undeniable. The 3 most frequently used words in most of the questions are NEED, WANT and WISH. As a result, I've developed a simple, yet powerful question that I frequently ask people when I first meet them. I think this is the ultimate question to ask people in order to discover how you might help them. Six simple words can provoke and inspire some deep thoughts.

"What is NEEDED, WANTED or WISHED?"

Needs Are Different from Wants.
Three words (Needs, Wants, Wishes) may seem synonymous but they can provoke very different responses. What people think they need may not be what they want, and conversely, what some people want may not be what they need. Therefore, it is important to ask people what they need and want.

The WISH Word Inspires Dreaming.
When I attended a Synectics workshop I discovered the importance of phrasing problem headlines that began with the "I wish…" phrase that connects with desired experiences.

The Question is a KnowBrainer.
For graduates of my innovation training workshops and owners of the KnowBrainer innovation tool, you now know how I've incorporated the "Needs, Wants, Wish" question into the Stage 1 of the Accelerated Innovation Process and card #10 of the KnowBrainer.

Investigate-to-Innovate Exercise:

1. Identify 3-5 people you want to help
2. Ask them, "What do you need, want or wish?"
3. Take notes and distinguish the differences between needs, wants, and wishes
4. Create ideas to help them address their needs or wants, or make their wishes become reality

Idea-lly, Gerald "Solutionman" Haman
Founder, InnovationTrainingWorkshops.com

46 Questions to Help Innovators Know What Customers Want

Every innovator should read Anthony Ulwick's book, What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services, because he makes it very easy to questionate-to-innovate. SolutionPeople purchased 50 copies of the book and made it required reading before an innovation facilitation for a consumer products company. The facilitation agenda was simple; we used innovative techniques and tools to answer the 46 questions addressed in the book! The facilitation was a huge success as we produced an Idea Bank with thousands of ideas and over 100 useful solutions.

Question Bank
(created from the Table of Contents in Ulwick's Book)

Formulating Innovation Strategy
1. Who Is the Target of Value Creation and How Should It Be Achieved?
2. What Types of Innovation Are Possible?
3. What Growth Options Should Be Considered?
4. Where in the Value Chain Should We Focus to Maximize Value Creation?
5. How Do We Handle Multiple Constituents with Potentially Conflicting Outcomes?

Capture Customer Inputs
6. Why Should Companies Gather Customer Requirements?
7. What Three Issues Plague the Requirements-Gathering Process?
8. What Types of Data Do Companies Commonly Collect from Customers?
9. What Customer Inputs Are Needed to Master the Innovation Process?
10. What Methods Should Companies Use to Obtain the Necessary Information?
11. How Do You Know Which of the Three Types of Inputs You Should Capture?

Identifying Opportunities
12. What Is an Opportunity?
13. What Three Common Mistakes Are Made in Prioritizing Opportunities?
14. How Should Companies Prioritize Opportunities?
15. How Do You Identify Underserved and Overserved Markets?
16. How Dos Value Migrate Over Time?
17. What Implications Does the Outcome-Driven Paradigm Have for Competitive Analysis?

Segmenting the Market
18. What Is the Purpose of Segmentation?
19. How Has the Practice of Segmentation Evolved?
20. Why Are Traditional Segmentation Methods Ineffective for Purposes of Innovation?
21. What Is Different About Outcome-Based Segmentation?
22. How Is Outcome-Based Segmentation Performed?
23. How Does Outcome-Based Segmentation Address Development and Marketing Challenges?
24. How Is Job-Based Segmentation Different, and When Should it Be Used?

Targeting Opportunities for Growth
25. What Is Different About Targeting for Innovation?
26. What Types of Broad-Market Opportunities Are Likely to Be Attractive?
27. What Segment-Specific Targeting Strategies Are Effective?
28. How Does a Targeting Strategy Result in a Unique and Valued Competitive Position?
29. Why Do Companies Fail to Target Key Opportunities?

Positioning Current Products
30. Why Does Messaging Often Fail to Tout a Product's True Value?
31. What Are the Prerequisites for an Effective Messaging Strategy?
32. What Messaging Will Be Most Effective?
33. Should a Company Message Along an Emotional or Functional Dimension?
34. How Does the Sales Force Have Immediate Impact on Revenue Generation?
35. What Is the Advantage of an Outcome-Based brand?

Prioritizing Projects in the Development Pipeline
36. What Issues Do Companies Face When Prioritizing Projects?
37. What Method Is Used to Identify the Winners and the Losers?
38. Which Efforts Should Get Top Priority?
39. What Other Factors Affect Project Prioritization?

Devising Breakthrough Concepts
40. Why Does Traditional Brainstorming Often Fail to Produce Breakthrough Ideas?
41. How Are Breakthrough Concepts Successfully Generated?
42. What Are the Mechanics Behind Focused Brainstorming?
43. Why Do Traditional Concept-Evaluation Methods Fail?
44. How Is the Customer Scorecard Used to Evaluate Product and Service Concepts?
45. How Are These Methods Applied in Practice?
46. What Is the Role of R&D in the Innovation Process?

Order Anthony Ulwick's book, What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services via Amazon.com

8 Great Questions Every Innovator Should Ask and Answer (Download Free Poster)

SolutionPeople has helped over 60% of BusinessWeek's Most Innovative Companies in the World be more innovative by helping their people find solutions to their questions about innovation challenges. Below are 8 of the most thought-provoking questions that were collected from SolutionPeople customer's during innovation meetings, workshops and facilitations.

"8 Great Innovation Questions" Most Frequently Asked by SolutionPeople's Customers
1. How can we innovate to achieve goals, overcome challenges and solve problems?
2. How can we learn and improve innovative and creative thinking skills?
3. How can we apply new or proven tools, software and techniques that stimulate innovation and creativity?
4. How can we find and collaborate with more innovative people?
5. How can we inspire more innovation and fun?
6. How can we design environments and spaces that inspire innovation?
7. How can we implement proven innovation models, systems and processes?
8. How can we plan, launch and manage innovation initiatives and programs?

Download a pdf of your FREE color poster of the 8 Great Questions by clicking HERE. Take the 8x11 inch poster to your next meeting to stimulate some very provocative innovation conversations.
SolutionPeople's favorite question…
How might we help you?

Since SolutionPeople is frequently asked the Great 8 Questions, we have some answers!
Send an email for innovation help or answers to the questions by clicking HERE.

20 Questions to Increase Digital Engagement

Internet marketing experts Leland Harden and Bob Heyman authored, Digital Engagement, to help people understand how internet marketing can capture customers and build brand loyalty. The book contains a superb 2-page "Digital Engagement Scorecard" that is ideal for identifying innovative growth opportunities by leveraging the internet.

Harden offered the following 20 questions to get started on the path towards better digital engagement.

20 Questions to Increase Digital Engagement
1. What is digital engagement?
2. Is your site instrumented for measurement, and which web analytics tools should you consider?
3. What metrics should you be watching? What should you be measuring?
4. How can you protect all relevant domain names?
5. How can you aggressively protect your brand on search engines?
6. Should you be using more than just Google in your search program?
7. What is entailed in doing effective search engine optimization?
8. What are the best ways to use blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts or webinars to reach customers?
9. What should you consider when you set up a corporate blogging initiative?
10. How do you identify and recruit important influencers of your customer base?
11. How can you empower your customers to be effective word of mouth/word of web marketers for you?
12. How can you incorporate best practices of web video on your site?
13. How can you make a video go viral?
14. How can you make sure your web videos help your search engine rankings?
15. How can you make your online advertising more effective?
16. How can you easily gain incredible competitive intelligence on the web?
17. How you can use social networks to reach customers?
18. How should I utilize virtual worlds in my marketing initiatives?
19. What questions should I consider for the mobile web?
20. What are some of the best practices being utilized by companies using Web 2.0 tools?

Naturally, the book begins to answer all of the above questions. You can purchase Digital Engagement from Amazon.com by clicking HERE.

Investigate-to-Innovate with Solutionman's 7 Favorite "Needs, Wants, & Wishes" Questions

Gerald Haman devoted about 20 years to fine tune and perfect just SEVEN questions. Indeed that’s a long time, but innovators discovered the questions keep getting better.

Customers named the 7 questions, “Haman’s Investigator Questions” or HIQ. HIQ became famous as innovators have used the questions to generate thousands of ideas. Adidas used Haman’s Questions to develop award-winning sport shoes. Valvoline used Haman’s Investigator Questions to create breakthrough automotive products. AT&T used HIQ to better understand customers and tailor product offerings. Microsoft used HIQ to plan a successful conference for thousands of people.

While studying instructional design in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, Haman realized that one of the most important questions, instructional designers should ask was: “What should people know, and when do they need to know it?” That single question evolved into 7 questions as Haman helped customers apply the original instructional design question to designing innovative products, services and experiences.

Haman’s Instructional Design Question
(1990 Original): What should people KNOW, and WHEN do they need to know it?

Haman’s 7 Innovative Investigator Questions (2009 Version)

1. What should people BE? 
2. What should people KNOW?
3. What should people FEEL? 
4. What should people HAVE? 
5. What should people DO?
6. What should people THINK?
7. What should people SENSE?

Over the years the questions and their order have changed and evolved as innovators realized the questions could be used by nearly anyone for almost any goal, challenge or problem. Most people start out by asking a few traditional questions such as “What’s your goal? or What are the problems?” However those questions may not provoke people to think deeply or broad enough. Go ahead and experiment by using Haman’s Innovative Investigator Questions for your next meeting, interview or survey.

For owners of Haman’s KnowBrainer Innovation Tool, the questions will look familiar as they are included in the Investigate Stage of the tool.

Questionate-to-Innovate: Questionation Method Produced Over 3 Million Ideas

SolutionPeople has helped innovators generate over 3 million ideas. What is one of the secrets to their successful ideations that lead to innovation? One secret is their proprietary Questionation™ Method that includes developing provocative questions to be used in innovative facilitations, training workshops, meetings and innovation events.
Surveys have found that Questionation™ Methods have increased meeting productivity, reduced meeting time and increased participant engagement. Most importantly, innovation facilitations that used Question Banks and the Questionation Methods yielded 34-65% more ideas than traditional meetings that followed typical agendas.

Question Banks & Topics
Questionation involved developing unique "Question Banks" for a wide variety of innovation goals, problems or challenges. Agendas and facilitation plans are structured in a way so that key questions are addressed throughout the meeting or event. Answers to questions are collected and deposited in Idea Banks that are used for follow-through and implementation.

Over 10,000 questions have been collected or created by SolutionPeople since 1989. SolutionPeople created question banks for over 100 topics including new product development, sales, marketing, experience design, meeting planning and strategic planning. Haman teaches facilitators, trainers and coaches how to apply the Questionation method during workshops and webinars.

Why Are Questions Important?
"If you want to come up with great ideas, you need to ask great questions," states Gerald "Solutionman" Haman who invented the "questionated" innovation tool called the KnowBrainer. The KnowBrainer contains 40 provocative questions that actually help users generate more questions, as well as lots of ideas!

Record-Setting Thinkathon Used 100 Questions
A future Innovator's Digest article will reveal how Solutionman set several world brainstorming records by using the Questionation Method and KnowBrainer tool.  Over 454,000 ideas were brainstormed by 8,000 people who used 100 questions in SolutionPeople's Thinkathon at the Singapore Stadium.

Do You Questions About Questionation?
Email your questions to solutionman@solutionpeople.com!

Create Market Place Disruption: 12 Questions to Get Started

In his new book Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition, Adam Hartung describes why most businesses are unable to maintain superior performance. The companies that continue to succeed, such as Apple, Virgin and Nike, are constantly disrupting the market – by implementing new business models, releasing new technology or changing how customers buy most companies, Hartung notes, become "locked-in" to the ways they achieved success in the past. That keeps them focused on defending their market position and business model rather than making the changes that they need to seize the opportunities in the dynamic market place. Because companies become "locked-in" to their old ways, they often fail to recognize their own vulnerabilities or the opportunities for accelerating growth. Applying his "Phoenix Principle," Hartung shows how companies can put a process in place for continually repositioning their businesses to create disruptions in the marketplace to break down competitors' defenses and achieve accelerated growth.

Hartung provided Innovator's Digest readers with the following Question Bank to stimulate ideas to apply concepts from his book:

1. What are the biggest obstacles to innovation in your organization?
2. Why do projects identified in brainstorming or ideation sessions seem to never get off the back burner?
3. Why is there so much funding for legacy work, but so little funding for innovation?
4. When you know you have to do something new, why does it seem like your organization keeps doing what it always did - knowing full well results won't improve?
5. What metrics need to change in order to create focus on innovation?
6. Why do managers pay lip service to innovation, but never give innovation projects more time and attention?
7. Why don't customer interviews produce more innovation?
8. Why do we get surprised by competitors that introduce new solutions in our core business?
9. What should happen to give you more time to create innovative solutions in your business?
10.Who should be responsible for implementing innovation?
11. How does the budgeting process accommodate innovation projects?
12. Are "disciplined" or "focused" organizations better, or worse, at implementing innovation?

Order the provocative book on Amazon by Clicking HERE.

New "Politicator" Brainstorming Technique: Use Obama and McCain's Words to Innovate (Download Free Worksheet)

Interesting innovation opportunities can be inspired by paying attention to the language used by American presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. I've created a new brainstorming technique called The Innovative Politicator™ for people who want to develop innovative ideas that are politically correct. Now you can now generate ideas that appeal to Republicans, Democrats and Independents by using the whole brain – not just the right of left sides!

   
Technique Background
Content for The Innovative Politicator™ was identified by applying rhetorical analysis methods I learned in Graduate School at the University of Minnesota where I earned a Masters degree in Communications. I took pages of notes while listening to weeks of speeches by McCain, Obama, and Vice Presidential nominees Joe Biden and Sara Palin. Over a 2-week period, that included national conventions of both parties, I kept track of the words used by each candidate and made note of which words generated high levels of applause and emotional engagement. I was fascinated by the similarities and differences between the rhetoric of both parties. There are over 900,000 thousand words in the English language and I identified 37 words (called Wordators in the worksheet) to stimulate ideas.

37 Political Brainstorming Words
RepublicansDemocratsBothParties
1. America
2. Better
3. Care
4. Change
5. Character
6. Children
7. Country
8. Democrats
9. Education
10. Energy
11. Families
12. Fight
13. Future
14. Going
15. Government
16. Health care
17. Hope
18. Independents
19. Jobs
20. Leader
21. Life
22. Love
23. Mothers
24. Nation
25. Party
26. People
27. President
28. Promise
29. Reform
30. Republicans
31. Stand
32. Taxes
33. Trust
34. Work
35. World
36. Years
37. Young

Download Your Free Worksheet
Individuals and teams can use this self instructional worksheet for a wide variety of goals, challenges, problems and questions.

Download your FREE PDF of The Innovative Politicator™ Worksheet by Clicking HERE. The worksheet is simple and self instructional. Consider it a gift that you can share with innovators regardless of their political views.

Politicate-to-Innovate, 
Gerald "Solutionman" Haman

Success is Dangerous

It's that time of the year again. Dan and his senior management team are at their annual strategic business meeting. They're feeling pretty good having just come off of a few years of success. As they get into the their planning discussion, a sinking feeling starts to come over the team. Where's the 2008, 2009, 2010 growth going to come from? Do they have enough in the pipeline? Has success inadvertently led them into the danger zone? Have they taken their eye off the "innovation ball?"

Hit it out of the park, by infusing an innovation culture into your organization. Below is a Part I excerpt of the "LEADING INNOVATION Question Bank" covering process (based on SolutionPeople's Accelerated Innovation Process) and designed for leaders who want to enable, inspire and drive innovation. Stay tuned for excerpts from Parts II & III covering the other aspects of culture such as strategy, communication, reward & recognition, structure, learning & development, and work environment.

LEAD-to-INVESTIGATE

1. What mechanisms, processes & methods are we using to determine what is needed, wanted or wished by our customers?
2. What percent of our strategy should be focused on incremental innovation versus breakthrough innovation?
3. How should we fund, resource and organize our innovation strategy?

LEAD-to-CREATE

1. How might we collaborate with customers, suppliers, partners, employees, academia, or competitors?
2. How might we form whole-brain teams for diversity of thought?
3. What innovation tools might we provide?

LEAD-to-EVALUATE

1. How could we evaluate ideas, prototypes, and concepts?
2. Who could be on the evaluation team?
3. How could we nurture ideas, but know when to stop developing them if necessary?

LEAD-to-ACTIVATE

1. What internal and external networks must be created & leveraged to bring our product or service to the desired market?
2. Who from the "investigate, create or evaluation team" must be included?
3. What roadblocks must I, as a leader, work to eliminate? 

Corinne Miller - Innovation Consultant, Facilitator, Trainer & Coach at SolutionPeople
Email Corinne