• by Jesse Purewal , Andy Stefanovich , May 9, 2011

The quest for growth requires ever-more dramatic on-ramps to inspire breakthrough products. Samsung dispatches ethnographers to follow teenagers in New York and Tokyo in search of mobile-device design insights. A competition in emerging markets sponsored by Hewlett Packard generates affordable home electronics ideas. Procter & Gamble famously co-developed Mr. Clean Magic Eraser through a unique partnership among outside designers, company scientists, and brand managers.

Stories of the "must-have product" and the "killer app" foster the illusion that there is a silver bullet for creating ideas. If we just created a more entrepreneurial culture, Yahoo might argue, we could attract the brightest engineers from around Silicon Valley, who would develop products to re-establish the company's leadership. If we just increased R&D expenditures, Siemens could suggest, we could displace GE in key segments by creating faster, safer, and more reliable engines.

But there is no magic formula. Inspiration is like other important business functions, and borne of diligent effort, effective teamwork and creative thinking. But most organizations are not structured to harness their peoples' efforts in search of new and better ideas.

How do successful innovators do it? We have identified six common sources of inspiration used by such leaders as Disney, Apple, Google, and P&G use to drive growth. Most important, they have the discipline to leverage and act on these sources of inspiration to consistently create great stuff and great experiences.

Every organization can become a productive source of inspired and actionable ideas by practicing the Inspiration Discipline -- or "looking at more stuff and thinking about it about it harder" -- across the six sources of inspiration: Company capabilities, brand DNA, customer insight, industry and trend analysis, experiential analogs, and company archives -- and assemble these inputs into coherent actionable ideas. It demands time and effort, but the returns can be great, leading to sustainable innovation across all markets and categories. Consider three great examples:

Inspired to clean. Like the Magic Eraser, Procter & Gamble's first Swiffer Duster was developed in conjunction with outside engineers seeking to commercialize new cleaning technology. But this was just one input. P&G also pored over customer research, which revealed a strong dissatisfaction with the painful, messy, and unattractive mop-and-broom. Its teams accompanied scores of professional housekeepers to discover that they were seeking a more portable and disposable solution, even as innovation in home cleaning was moving toward heavier, more industrial solutions. P&G also examined home construction data, finding a large increase of homes with wooden floors that lend themselves to quicker and easier cleaning methods. The intersection of these insights resulted in the idea of a lightweight mop with disposable cloths, the first of many products in P&G's Swiffer line that joined the company's stable of billion-dollar brands in short order.

Inspired to buy. Amazon's Prime, a program that allows customers to pay $79 per year for unlimited two-day shipping for just about every product, is another Inspired idea. Shipping costs and lag times have long been key barriers to online shopping. However, no one looked as keenly at potential solutions to the problem as Amazon. The company combined a core capability (operations and distribution), a key customer insight (the lag between purchase and delivery as a purchase barrier), and an ecosystem trend (significant investment in logistics excellence by FedEx and UPS) to devise an intriguing offer: Its annual "I want it now" fee of $79 would eliminate the classic tradeoff between convenience (online shopping) and fulfillment (offline shopping). Amazon Prime has hugely increased customer satisfaction and generates 20% of the company's U.S. sales from the 3 to 4% of users that subscribe.

Inspired to read. The proliferation of individual media content applications for smartphones and other mobile devices has created an uninspiring cluster of newspapers and magazines that sit on virtual shelves, pulled down individually by the user. Flipboard, a tablet application (created by the eponymous company), has changed that. It aggregates all the media content a user cares about and compiles it into a personalized magazine format.

Flipboard's innovation capitalized on the intersection of four key trends -- an exploding tablet market; improving personalization algorithms on media websites; rapid growth in digital content, and increasing ubiquity of broadband. Flipboard ingeniously delivers digital content in a format that is familiar, intuitive, and fresh, cutting through the clutter of existing applications and pushing publishers and advertisers to create higher-quality, more-relevant content. It meets, and from the beginning was inspired by, the key unmet customer need of having all of one's favorite online content in a single place.

Innovation does not happen overnight, nor does it happen in a vacuum. As these examples demonstrate, the Inspiration Discipline requires companies to astutely observe and act on inputs that may only be partially visible at first glance. Those looking to benefit from lasting innovation will do well to set aside time and resources to study trends within and across categories, determining which questions aren't being asked today, and considering how to capitalize on their strengths, competencies, and competitive advantages to respond with products and services that matter.

Look at more stuff. Think about it harder. And be inspired.