In education, science and business, we all get brought up to focus on turning data into intelligence in order to create knowledge. However, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted: “Knowing many things doesn’t teach insight.” Today, I want to introduce you to the concept of insights that plays a vitally important role at the frontend of innovation.

What is an insight? An insight is an “Aha!”-realization of deep — and often sudden — understanding of what’s really going on in a given situation. Here is an example to make this rather conceptual definition more tangible. Do you remember when news broke out that a commercial airplane crashed into a tower of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001? Initially, the media and authorities believed that a very unfortunate accident had occurred. When the second airplane crashed into the other tower of the WTC within an hour, every observer got the immediate insight: America is under a terror attack. Got it now what I mean by a deep, sudden understanding about the true nature of things in a given situation?

At THINKERGY, we begin each innovation project with Stage X—Xploration, the first part of our systematic X-IDEA innovation method. Thereby, we guide an innovation team toward gaining novel insights into the true nature of their challenge in order to help them understand what is really going on in the situation under investigation. As we ask great questions, induce perspective shifts, perform reality checks and visually map out the various aspects of the challenge, something surprising happens: A number of novel insights start to pop up that completely change the understanding of the situation. The creativity researcher Arthur Koestler described these sudden realizations of the true reality of an ambiguous situation as follows: “The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flashes, or short-circuits of reasoning.”

We ask our clients to capture all novel insights in a single collection space that we call an Insights List. Thereby, it is often handy to distinguish between different types of insights, such as customer or consumer insights, market insights, competitor insights, insights related to your own company, and so on. Throughout their Xplorer’s Journey, the innovation team members keep on adding freshly emerging insights to their Insights List. At the end of the X-Stage, the team then discusses how novel and important each insight is, and finally visualizes the results in an Insights Map. (All insights that are either highly novel and/or highly important end up in what we call the “Aha!-Zone”, and they should be communicated to everyone who participates in a later ideation effort.) This systematic sequence of steps is the key to help our clients gain a deep understanding of the true nature of their innovation challenge, and to move from knowledge to wisdom.

Why are insights so vitally important to capture in an innovation project? Really novel and important insights often radically change the character of an innovation project, and may often lead to interesting initial ideas that may form the core of the final challenge resolution, as the following story shows.

In January 2001, Apple reported a quarterly loss of $195m caused by a general economic downturn and a sharp decline in sales. One of the major drivers of the drop in sales was that Apple’s highly popular iMacs suddenly did not sell anymore. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs probed for reasons of the iMac sales drop. He soon learned that customers stopped buying iMacs because they were not equipped with a CD burner. Probing further for the reason for the critical importance of CD burners for computer sales, Jobs found out that customers now demanded it to burn their digital music to CDs.

This revelation triggered a major insight for Jobs that probably sounded something along the lines of: “It’s music, stupid!” While Apple had focused on developing digital video solutions, the consumers were really interested in digital music. In 2000, music started migrating from the stereo to the computer. Being absorbed by his focus on digital video, Jobs failed to notice the birth of the digital music revolution. “I felt like a dope,” Jobs said later. “I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.”

Jobs immediately focused on the major trend that he had missed. Apple licensed the SoundJam MP software and retooled it into the iTunes digital music player that Jobs introduced at the Macworld Expo in January 2001. While Jobs and his team explored the existing market solutions for digital music, a second major insight emerged: “All existing music players stink!” This insight triggered the idea to develop a better digital music player from Apple. On 23 October 2001, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod with the words: “This is a major breakthrough.” It was. The rest of the story is history. The iPod has sold over 200 million units and commands a market share of roughly 70% of digital music players.

The Apple story is remarkable in many ways. First of all, it shows how one can turn a major problem and one’s own failure into a major opportunity. Secondly, it is a nice example of the perspective shift called Vuja Dé, which describes a situation where you fail to notice something very important that has been there right in front of your eyes for quite some time. Lastly and most importantly here, the story underlines the importance of insights for innovation.

Conclusion: At the beginning of an innovation project, make an effort to gain novel insights —track them, evaluate them, and use the really novel and important ones as stimulus for initial ideas that may become part of your final solution. This requires you to invest time and energy in thoroughly Xploring your innovation challenge before starting your subsequent ideation, idea development, evaluation and activation efforts — but as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe cautioned: “There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.”

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2009. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 16 July 2009.