One approach is to solve the specific problem or fill the specific need of an individual customer—not an individual customer group, but a single, solitary individual customer. The idea here is the same as above: if you invent a solution to the problem of a single customer, chances are there are other potential customers hidden in the woodwork that would also be interested in the innovation.

Ballard Medical Products, with sales of about $10 million in 1987, set a strategy to develop and dominate niches that big companies neglected, and to do so by prolific new-product innovation.

The first premise at Ballard, as described in an Inc. magazine article, is that customers themselves are an integral part of the product innovation process. The second premise is that salespeople—people actually out dealing directly with customers—are also part of the process. Salespeople are expected to go on-site and interact directly with the customer as he goes about his activities. A salesman for Ballard described:

You can’t just ask the director of respiratory therapy or the head nurse if there are problems. You’ve got to walk through yourself . . . and ask the nurses whether they’ve got problems.

The third premise at Ballard is that R&D must respond to product ideas from salespeople. In one instance, the vice president of sales proposed his own product idea, helped design it, and worked with R&D to get it out the door. The entire product innovation cycle—from concept to delivery— was only a few months.

If there is one characteristic that signals creativity in business, it might be follow-through. For instance, Nolan Bushnell is only one of the people who could be credited for fathering the video game, but he often gets the credit because he was the first to bring any to market in a big way. He says:

After the creative moment I thought, “Gee, anybody should be able to make a business out of it.” As it turned out, anybody could. I had twenty-seven competitors so fast! (Laughter)

With ten countries representing 85 percent of profits, P&G had to focus on winning in those countries. We asked where consumers expected P&G brands and products to be sold, that is, mass merchandisers and discounters, drugstores, and grocery stores. Core became a theme in innovation as well. P&G scientists determined the core technologies that were important across the businesses and focused on those technologies above all others. We wanted to shift from a pure invention mind-set to one of strategic innovation; the goal was innovation that drove the core. Core consumers were a theme too; we pushed businesses to focus on the consumer who matters most, targeting the most attractive consumer segments. Core was the first and most fundamental where-to-play choice—to focus on core brands, geographies, channels, technologies, and consumers as a platform for growth.

A team led by Professor Dan Schwartz evaluated two groups. One started with three ideas in parallel, then subsequently had two more ideas on the way to their final idea. The second team started with one idea and then iterated four more times. Each team generated five rounds of ideas, but the parallel team did much better—generating more ideas and clearly better final solutions. The serial team—who started with just one idea—tended to keep refining the same idea over and over, never really innovating. The conclusion is that if your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations. Designers have known this all along—you don’t want to start with just one idea, or you’re likely to get stuck with it. Try not to think of your Odyssey Plans as “Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C”—where A is the really good plan and B is the okay plan and C is the plan that you really hope you don’t get stuck with but that you would accept as tolerable if absolutely necessary. Every Odyssey Plan is a Plan A, because it’s really you and it’s really possible.