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853 : STEP ONE – SEEKING AND SHAPING OPPORTUNITIES

Favourite among Woodward’s many gadgets was a computer program
which the players came to respect and dread in equal measure.
Pioneered by four leading Premiership football clubs, Prozone tracked
every move and tackle and pass of every player from start to finish of a
game, bringing unprecedented factual rigour to post-match analysis.65

the technique of seeking inspiration from the
unfamiliar It is important to keep a perpetually open and

questioning mind so that you can take advantage of chance encounters,
events and insights which arise from your own life. Remember Louis
Pasteur’s wise counsel: ‘Chance favours the prepared mind.’

Sometimes, however, you just can’t see the wood for the trees. Tom
Kelley, general manager of IDEO, points out that in many parts of your
life, you go through steps so mechanically that it becomes impossible to
find inspiration for innovation by observing yourself. By going off the
beaten track, however, you are much more open to discovery – it
doesn’t matter whether you’re travelling to different places or
experiencing new activities or just doing something differently; it is at
those times that ‘you are more open to ask the childlike “Why?” and
“Why not?” questions that lead to innovation’.66

Sahar Hashemi, co-founder of Coffee Republic, took time off from her
career as a lawyer in order to travel. She ended up in New York to visit
her investment banker brother, Bobby. On the eve of their return to
London, they started lamenting that they would miss New York’s coffee
houses. Coffee Republic was the product of that lament.

By the same token, Chicago-based Gordon and Carole Segal spent their
honeymoon in Europe, where they saw and bought all kinds of unique,
functional and affordable designs for their home. On their return, they
discovered ‘that no one in Chicago was selling great design without
charging the equivalent of a mortgage. Not being able to afford much of
a mortgage themselves, the Segals decided to lease an abandoned
elevator factory . . . in Chicago to showcase the finds they were finding
all over the world’.67 Created specifically to capitalise on the product’s
proven success in another market, the Crate and Barrel concept now
boasts 115 stores throughout the United States.

There is every reason actively to seek out problems, opportunities and
solutions from other markets and other areas of endeavour without
feeling any shame. As arch-inventor Thomas Edison himself said: ‘Make