I worked with a CMO who would revel in difficult situations where it seemed we had too few resources, negligible support, and slight chances of success. As he'd always remind us, when you have almost no support, you have almost nothing to lose. Because of this, he saw difficult and resource-scarce times as the BEST opportunity for creativity and moving ahead with a bold innovation strategy.

Too Few Resources Can Create Opportunities to Innovate?

That idea sounds ridiculous on the surface, especially if you have plenty of money and support to bring your new innovation strategy to life.

Yet in situations where we had far fewer resources than necessary, we would step up our innovation game with extreme creativity and more ingenious ways to bring big ideas to life.

Based on these experiences, coming up with many possibilities to get things done in novel ways became second nature!

16 Ways to Find New Innovation Resources

Ultimately, exploring many paths for non-traditional resources became a standard procedure. It was so routine, in fact, I developed a battery of questions we could use when launching any project to identify a potential pool of resources to tap. These strategic thinking questions pushed our thinking on potential internal and external partners, strategy changes, places to borrow short cut ideas, and new outreaches for support.

The point behind all the questions was finding ways to accelerate our ability to innovate, turning more ideas into reality to move our business ahead.

We've compiled the questions into an eBook called, "Accelerate - 16 Keys to Finding Resources for Your Innovation Strategy," and you can get your own copy here.

Whether you use the questions individually or with your team, you'll discover ample new options to work around resource limitations standing in the way of your innovation strategy's progress! - Mike Brown