John Gerrie, the founder of KN3W IDEAS® is not your typicalinnovation 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 howoften 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, aglobal 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 havebeen 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 deliveredover £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 finding 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 andJohn’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 introvertedparticipants are left without being heard.
The KN3W IDEAS process helps organisations 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 explains 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-actionKN3W IDEAS workshops” 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 [email protected] 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 yourcustomer 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 solvingtechnique 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 totrigger thinking that is not limited by fixedness.
That is why KN3W IDEAS uses a patentpending 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 experiences,ideas and thinking are shared.
Main Template
Prioritisation Matrix
Task Selection Dice
Task Templates