Some business conferences you attend are beneficial because of specific content presented. Other business conferences are beneficial because of all the creative ideas they trigger, irrespective of whether the ideas were actually discussed by presenters. The Innovation Summit presented by Kansas City Kansas Community College last week soundly delivered on triggering ideas for strategic questions for disruptive innovation in markets.

In fact, the free, half-day Kansas City Kansas Community College Innovation Summit was a veritable bonanza since I walked away with a variety of ideas triggered by the presenters. Those ideas included ones for several new Brainzooming creative thinking exercises I’d never before imagined.

To do a little sharing, the presentations from keynote speaker Dean Teng-Kee Tan (of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Bloch School of Business) and several Kansas City innovators suggested eleven strategic questions to ask relative to imagining potential market disruption opportunities:

11 Strategic Questions for Disruptive Innovation

1. What feature can you create that’s missing in someone else’s product?

2. Where can you disrupt significant cost areas in physical goods?

3. How can you digitize a physical element, action, or experience – or digitize all three?

4. What steps can you take to create a service out of your strongest / most prevalent support capability?

5. How can you inject a completely emotional experience into what you do?

6. Ever thought about ways to digitize a service?

7. How is it possible to smooth demand for inefficient / difficult to provide capabilities?

8. What would it take to turn in-person interactions into remote interactions?

9. How can you digitize scarce resources to put them in more places simultaneously?

10. What could you do to help push the biggest player in your desired market to leave the marketplace?

11. If the most prominent player in your market did go away, what opportunities would it open up?

Asking the Right Strategic Question

Again, none of the presenters necessarily mentioned these strategic questions for disruptive innovation. The questions were derived from the various case studies and examples presenters shared and by asking one of my favorite questions:

What strategic question (or questions) could cause someone to come up with the same answer the original innovator did?

And when you land on great strategic questions, you can much more easily generate lots of innovation ideas. - Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and an expert on strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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