From invention to Idea Mining

The computer opened like a book. It had two facing black-and-white touchscreens, with the batteries housed in the spine. A custom application displayed documents across both screens as facing pages. It ran Windows 3.1, a calculator and a simple document-creation application. Other applications could be loaded through a serial connection and modem.

This was a functioning prototype I designed as a young engineer. The resolution was modest, but sufficient. Memory was scarce. Battery-backed static RAM provided storage and instant-on to the Windows interface, although it could not restore the document or task I had left. Close, but not quite there.

I had also realised that a physical keyboard need not be a permanent part of the device. A keyboard could appear on the touchscreen when required. I had not seen that done elsewhere. It was one of the possibilities I wanted the design to accommodate. On-screen keyboards became standard years later, with smartphones and tablets.

The prototype was never taken forward. I remember little interest in UK technology products at the time, and I was not in a position to raise the finance or take it to the United States. The working machine existed. The means to develop it into a business did not come together.

That unfinished project belongs in my innovation history alongside the work that did reach customers and improve businesses. It captures something important about the distance between seeing a possibility, making it work and being able to carry it further.

A record across sectors

Across several decades, my work has included more than 40 novel responses to technical and business needs: new products, new ways of manufacturing and supporting them, changes to business models, and businesses of my own. The results have included new product ranges, increased production capacity and improved profitability. The work has taken me from avionics and computing into consultancy, hospitality, off-grid sanitation and connected products.

The sectors vary considerably. Looking across that history now, I am interested in the thinking that travelled between them, and how I gradually learned to make it visible to other people.

One example involved redesigning an entire manufacturing and procurement process. The work reduced costs by 40%. Most of that saving was not hard to find. The cost structure and the supply chain were both wrong, and plenty of the fruit was low-hanging. Nobody had noticed, because nobody had looked across the whole of it. I also added product lines, further improving the bottom line. The object of innovation there was the way the business operated: how it made and obtained what it needed, and what it could offer customers.

A different example came from off-grid sanitation. Over several years, my work included a urine separator, new processes for working with fibreglass, an automated ventilation system, components produced through a 3D print farm, and a production management system. Other businesses incorporated my products into their own designs.

The flat-pack toilet illustrates why the connections matter. One design change, made possible by computer-controlled cutting, lowered the cost of the product and changed how customers could buy it. Its value extended well beyond the physical object. Those same ideas were later taken up for a UN project on sanitation in remote areas of Africa.

A design has consequences for the people who manufacture it, the people who support it and the customers who use it. There may be opportunities in those connections that remain invisible if everyone looks only at their own part of the work.

The same record also includes a restaurant I founded and eventually sold, which was voted Restaurant of the Year by public vote from more than 500 venues. Hospitality presents very different practical demands from computing or manufacturing. It nevertheless belongs in an account of innovation grounded in real needs, workable delivery and commercial consequences.

Innovating before I could explain it

I did not begin that career with Idea Mining laid out in front of me. My approach was informal. I innovated before I could clearly explain my own process.

I sometimes describe this as being able to move from A to Z. I can see a possible answer without having set out every connection that brought me to it. Looking back, the jump was rarely a leap. The tunnels were already dug.

Conscious sensing

I now call this conscious sensing. Mining is one form of it: tunnels running up and down the business, across its functions, and out into its supply chain, its customers and the wider industry. Each tunnel brings back what that part of the world knows. Most of it is ordinary. Where tunnels cross, something becomes visible that none of them shows on its own.

Conscious sensing helps solutions find themselves. I rarely had to hunt for an answer. With enough awareness of the situation, the answer started to look obvious, at least to me. Awareness breeds innovation.

The restaurant began that way. I noticed a gap around food intolerances that the existing venues were not serving, and built the format around it. The flat-pack toilet came from tunnels into what the product cost to make, what it cost to move and who could put it together. Computer-controlled cutting made a lower-cost design possible. The same parts could be assembled in our factory or shipped flat, direct to customers and to distributors, for self-assembly. Each of those tunnels on its own was ordinary. Together they gave one product three routes to market.

It is conscious because it is deliberate. In most organisations sensing, one of the four capabilities in Conscious Agility, is left to whoever happens to read the news, talk to customers or walk the production floor. Done consciously, the tunnels are chosen, dug and kept open.

That was what other people could not see when I jumped from A to Z. Involving them required more than showing the answer: they needed to see the tunnels, dig their own and help decide what the crossings meant.

From practice to method

Over time, I began recognising how I worked. Bringing that process to the surface allowed me to involve others in it. Idea Mining emerged through that development. Its origins are in practice, followed by a growing understanding of the practice and how to share it.

That matters when I look back at my inventions. The early work helped produce the method. It would be misleading to describe all of it as the result of applying a framework that I had already defined.

In its developed form, Idea Mining gives people a shared way to explore where value might be created, generate possibilities and work on making those possibilities viable. I describe those activities as Opportunity Mining, Idea Mining and Idea Smelting.

Opportunity Mining considers where to look: customer needs, the business strategy, changes in technology and the surrounding market. Idea Mining brings different perspectives to those opportunities and produces candidate ideas. Smelting develops those candidates against the practical realities of cost, capability and delivery. An idea that appears unpromising in its first form may become useful when its application, price or means of production changes.

Separating the stages lets people stay with different questions long enough to do useful work. There is room to explore an opportunity before committing to a product, and room to develop an idea before deciding its fate.

Where sensing meets collaboration

Conscious sensing sits where Idea Mining and Conscious Collaboration meet. Idea Mining gives the tunnels a direction: where to look, what to generate and how to make it viable. Conscious Collaboration keeps them open: making assumptions visible, giving people room to contribute and examining what they bring back on its merits.

Engineers, production staff, customer service, finance, suppliers and customers each see a different part of the same situation. One person's tunnels only reach so far. An organisation that senses consciously connects everyone's, and solutions start finding themselves there too.

This is where my personal innovation history connects to the work I do with organisations. The experience gives me a substantial body of practical work to draw on. Understanding more of my own process has made it possible to open that work to other people's thinking.

The prototype as a reminder

The two-screen computer remains a useful reminder. I could build a working prototype and still be unable to carry it into the market. In other projects, a change to a process or a product's construction opened up commercial possibilities. Both experiences belong in the method's history.

Decades later, the same question came back with a bio-sensing smart watch I founded a company to develop. This time I took it through to manufacturing readiness, then sold the IP to a US company rather than build it in the UK. Carrying an idea further does not always mean carrying it yourself.

I want people to be able to see enough of the route from an observation to an idea that they can question it, improve it and help decide what should happen next. That is how an informal personal practice began to become Idea Mining, and why I have continued developing it.

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Related: After the idea · Idea Mining · Conscious Collaboration · Conscious Agility · all writing