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

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

Give respondents permission and space to tell their stories, but don’t take everything they say at face value—you should be as skeptical of their statements (and as appreciative of them) as of any other data. Phrase your questions concretely, and ask for examples. Consumers can’t give you honest, meaningful information not because they are lying on

In The Black Swan, epistemologist Nassim Taleb talks about “narrative fallacy,” or the idea that imperfect stories about the past form our present perceptions and future outlook.

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.

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.