Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation

Your insights will bubble up when you connect consumer behavior and interpret it culturally.

Particularly revolutionary ideas can be too much change for people to handle. Innovations often need to be explained in terms of the status quo. Think about metaphor as a way to use cultural imprinting to provide useful explanations that will aid adoption, which might explain why automobiles are rated in horsepower and electric lights in candlepowe

Look at your resources—every false start, tool, prototype, note, gadget, materials, formula, recipe, or report available—from a different perspective. Who else might these things interest, how can they be combined or tweaked, why didn’t they work the first time around, and how might they work now? Look at your resources through the eyes of other pe

Segmentation is about talking to someone at a single moment in time, and there are so many moments in time. We are situational animals, and we use products differently depending on our mood and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. That’s another reason why segmentation studies don’t work. From this perspective, it is almost impossible to u

One of the reasons why so many people fail when they think that an unusual observation is a key to an insight is that they don’t bother to find out whether or not the observation is linked to a greater cultural extension.

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them. —MALCO

Ask tough questions. Am I wrong? Has someone else thought of this? Where can I take this idea? What do I need to find out to take it further? Was this an easy, emotional way out of something uncertain? Can I tilt this information in another direction and find a deeper truth, one that is bigger and more exciting?

To harness strategic intuition, you have to leave the subject and the facts and stop thinking so hard about them. The literal presence of mind that comes when you clear your brain of all expectations is what usually precedes a flash of insight. That flash gives you the power to come up with and act on an idea.

Worse, by the time a company creates something based on a trend, everyone else has already done so; it’s last in, so it’s not noteworthy. It’s not so easy to differentiate oneself at that point.

Popular culture prevails, and within that framework fragments of many thousands of meanings exist—and we all contribute to them. That has resulted in the division of standard macrocultures (“American culture,” “Japanese culture”) into many microcultures (“Hipsters,” “Goth”). Indeed, shifts in the macroculture happen when the habits and preferences