Articles, Featured Articles, Strategic Innovation

The world could use plenty of innovative ideas right now. In these recessionary and disruptive times, the mission of Noodleplay.com is to search for positive and inspirational ideas that not only create customer and economic value, but drive positive change. It is a place to share, to critic and to collaborate, especially since good ideas will have to be increasingly defended against recessionary cost-cutting and sustainability critiques of generating wasteful and unnecessary stuff.

Today ideas are everywhere; it is a question of how to make them sense of them. Author of The Creative Economy, John Howkins, discusses talent, capital and the creativity monopoly. He argues that it doesn’t matter where you get your ideas from, what matters is what you can do with them. The power of ideas is both overrated and underrated. Plato was right: ideas rule the world, and, as people’s minds will receive new ideas, laying aside the old and effete, the world will advance: mighty revolutions will spring from them; creeds and even powers will crumble before their onwards march, crushed by the irresistible force. It will be just as impossible to resist their influx, when the time comes, as to stay the progress of the tide.

Noodleplay is not about the next cool thing. It is about sensemaking. It is the noodling of ideas that spark innovation, big transformative ones and small innovative ones. Hopefully a few big ones will emerge here and change the way we look at the world and compel us forward in a sustainable fashion for years to come. The next Innovation is about solving bigger problems and innovation that is transformative in nature. How do we make sense of all these complexities? The three most important toolkits that help create transformative innovation in Idea Couture’s toolbox are:

1. Sensemaking
2. Weak signals reading
3. Futuretyping

Many of our everyday goods are now coming from China or Mexico and the great legacy of industrial corporations that were once pillars of our economies are mostly in a parlous state. In manufacturing, the rates of change are themselves changing. Once companies, which owned important intellectual capital and patents could dominate their markets, but now anything can be reverse engineered and produced cheaply in Shenzhen, China. And everyday, there are tens of once-celebrated companies now struggling to regain their magical charm or some even fighting for their survivals. Having been knocked back on their heels by discontinuities and disruptive innovations, these companies are testament to a simple and disturbing fact: the world is becoming more turbulent faster than most companies are becoming more resilient.

The result: volatility in earnings, rapidly outdating of business models, and shrinking margins. Today, a company needs more than a competitive advantage; it needs an innovation advantage. Noodleplay is the place where sensemaking and imagination collide, where empathy meets economics, and shareholder responsibility meets social responsibility.