If you’ve come across anything about NEXT, you probably know that Ronny and I started the company together in 2016.

The company began as a side project during a period in which Ronny and I were toying with different startup ideas and technologies, as entrepreneurs-in-residence at Hasso Plattner Ventures in Berlin, while at summer break from our INSEAD MBAs.

We made great partners, because we both came from families which celebrated curiosity and discovery. Growing up — Ronny in Dresden, East Germany, I in Tehran, Iran — we pushed, pulled, poked, and pointed at anything that made us wonder. Our childhoods were full of “why” questions.

As we grew up, we continued to ask “why”. In doing so, we realized there were broken things in the world that needed to be fixed or improved.

And we learned we weren’t alone.

That’s why we founded NEXT.

Since then we’ve made it our mission to create software services that help people, teams, and organizations to discover opportunities in their customers’ needs or wants — and develop products that users love.

Our motto is to help clients bring their customers into every decision.

Five years ago, we weren’t positive that people would embrace our discovery-led, user research-driven, and evidence-based ways of creating new products, services, and experiences. But we were motivated by the belief that, if they did, it should be software-enabled, repeatable, and scalable. Thankfully, the market latched on — and we’ve since seen enormous shifts in how teams develop products.

Our customers have big aspirations. The type of disruption they are facing right now offers a once-in-every-few-generation opportunity for growth. To succeed, they’re pushing beyond whack-a-mole attempts at innovation and instead adopting discovery-led practices that put their customer at the center of every product decision.

For that, they need a purpose-built application to collect, analyze, share, and collaborate around their customers’ needs and wants.

And we wanted to deliver this. Meaning NEXT needed to evolve.

And so it has — into a full-blown product discovery platform.

In the past year, we have:

• Released new features that help teams collect, analyze, and share customer needs and wants
• Integrated software tools such as Jira, GitHub, Linear, Miro, Figma, so our users don’t feel as though they are switching between multiple solutions while working
• Introduced a new look and feel, which make NEXT more accessible and fun
• Launched the NEXT Community, which offers our customers an ever-expanding marketplace of proven product discovery frameworks from IDEO, This is Service Design Doing, Board of Innovation, and other thought leaders

We’re doing all this while staying true to our values: think bold, feel vibrant, act open, stay curious.

Our platform is NEXT through and through: user-friendly with one-of-a-kind support — and backed by the same people you know well and love.

We’ve been proud to serve as the launchpad for so many successful products — and it’s been exceptionally rewarding to watch you build better products, with faster time to market, and lower development costs.

“To find is the thing”, said Pablo Picasso. Go to NEXT to get started today, it’s free now and free forever.

Love 🚀

— Moodi

New Year, New NEXT was originally published in To find is the thing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2014, Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal entitled “Competition is for Losers.” There are only two categories of businesses, he writes: non-monopolies and monopolies.

And those businesses that build monopolies will “create and capture lasting value.”

From an early age, we’re taught that being competitive — and winning competitions — is a good thing. Whether you’re running in a schoolyard race, applying for a job, or starting a business — we’re always competing. It’s ingrained in our minds.

But wanting to compete isn’t always the right thing to do. So what if we stop playing the game and start our own?

Like Thiel, the 2004 book “Blue Ocean Strategy” also challenges the traditional view of competitive-based strategy. The blue ocean theory instead claims that, with the right approach, you can out-do other players by tapping into unaddressed demand (non-customers), thus creating and exploiting new markets — or “blue oceans.”

Discovering a blue ocean is extremely valuable, if only because you will secure a spot as that market’s “default” product or service, with everything else seemingly a cheap or lesser imitation.

Product teams, Blue Ocean Strategy, and NEXT

In his article, Thiel also argues that teams often focus on competing, while losing sight of what’s important — identifying and rushing for the path of least resistance. Product teams, Thiel says, shouldn’t focus on beating other products, they should instead attempt to monopolize an untapped market.

Enter the “blue ocean” strategy templates on NEXT.

In NEXT, product teams in corporations, government organizations, nonprofits, scale-ups, start-ups — it doesn’t matter — wanting to grow exponentially in untapped markets can now use blue ocean thinking during their discovery work to:

• Engage with customer and non-customers
• Gather evidence of unmet needs and aspirations
• Create and iterate on offerings that customers will love

A blue ocean strategy is deeply rooted in upfront and ongoing discovery. This discovery-focused approach lets product teams actively engage with users and the market to identify unmet user needs that push them beyond incremental improvements, toward transformational innovations in the product. The framework is similar to design-thinking’s “double diamond” framework, but adds its own concepts and tools for creating new demand and new markets — so-called “blue oceans”.

Product teams with high- and hyper-growth ambitions use Blue Ocean Strategy x NEXT to constantly uncover new unmet needs that will enlarge their target market. Naturally, this brings with it the need to attract “non-users.”

Of course, Blue Ocean Strategy x NEXT can also be used by product teams experiencing steep competition and eroding margins, helping them rethink their offerings for new customer groups and avoid the lose-lose setup of competition.

Product team success stories using Blue Ocean Strategy

The Nintendo Wii’s success is an excellent example of blue ocean thinking. In a market squarely focused on avid gamers, console brands competed on performance (in terms of game realism and graphic quality). With the development of the Nintendo Wii console, the product team behind Nintendo uncovered a blue ocean, which they dominated for years. The Wii’s new motion technology eliminated the need for traditional joysticks or controllers. Players could control their games by physically moving the “Wii Remote” — creating a new type of gaming experience.

The Wii’s product team’s offering expanded Nintendo’s addressable user base, from hardcore gamers to casual gamers — and even non-gamers. The Nintendo Wii transformed gaming into a family experience, bridging generational gaps to tap into a blue ocean. Ads for the gaming console showed grandparents playing with grandchildren, or elderly people playing together in retirement communities. The Nintendo Wii wasn’t just for gamers — it was for everyone. Targeting non-customers, the Wii outsold Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox combined, until the market was disrupted by smartphones and tablets.

Or, take personal care corporation Kimberly-Clark Brazil, where the product team in charge of toilet tissue used the blue ocean strategy to create a product that is both compact and eco-friendly.

To do so, the product team focused on these factors rather than competing with other companies to offer toilet paper at the cheapest possible price.

The compelling value created for users (a product that was easier to carry and store, and more environmentally friendly) resulted in an increase of sales. Moreover, it resulted in a 15% reduction in transportation costs, a 19% reduction in packaging, and gross margins exceeding 20%.

Bringing Blue Ocean Strategy to all product teams

NEXT, the #1 product discovery software used by hundreds of high-performing teams from companies including Deloitte, Bosch, and Canon, is teaming up with Six Paths Consulting, a leading consulting firm specialized in blue ocean strategies, to help product teams integrate the “blue ocean” framework into their product discovery work.

To do so, we have codified the blue ocean principles and methods into templates available in NEXT. This combined offering provides everything product teams need to scout, research, experiment, and iterate an increasingly differentiated product in a market they can own — not compete within.

By helping product teams identify blue oceans of growth and success, rather than battling in the one-and-the-same red ocean of competition, we will them unlock unprecedented value for end users — and the world. And unprecedented growth for the products.

So — what now?

Competition is overrated. In fact, product teams at Nintendo and Kimberly-Clark Brazil have shown us that it is the least efficient path to success. Instead of competing, they were successful by identifying unmet user needs and aspirations — “blue oceans” — and differentiating their products in already-crowded markets, rewarding them with monopolies.

Ready to start your own?

Sign up for NEXT now and let’s win — not compete.

- Moodi and Ioan

Competition is overrated was originally published in To find is the thing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Services matter.

“Services have come to dominate many national economies,” reads the World Trade Report 2019. “[And] they are playing a bigger role in the global economy as well.”

This evolution of a product-based economy towards a service-dominated economy is due to several factors — consumption and investment, among them — but technology is the “game-changer”, the report reveals. “Services that were once difficult to trade, because they could only be delivered in person, are becoming far easier to trade, because they can be delivered digitally.”

The rapid spread of digital infrastructure is further accelerating the importance of services in the portfolios of companies. These investments are a direct reaction to the fact that globally connected digital platforms tend to grant outsized rewards to a small number of star services, which are in turn able to be delivered at almost zero marginal cost.

The result? A 21st-century version of the gold rush, but this time for new, innovative services that will capture billions of users.

In this context — and unless they want to be in a commoditized business — companies must upgrade their offerings to the next stage of economic value by augmenting their products with new services or creating new standalone services.

Needless to say, the service revolution has arrived — big time. But given the ongoing disruptions, how can organizations not only adapt, but continue to thrive?

Adapt through service design

Like goods, services must also meet a customer-need. They have to work. They have to be desirable, feasible, and viable.

Using “service design” principles, we can spot opportunities in unmet customer needs and create services that users will love.

The book “This is Service Design Doing” outlines six principles for successful service designing:

• Human-centered — with all people affected by the service being the core of your research
• Collaborative — with all of the service’s stakeholders actively engaged in the design process
• Iterative — with an exploratory, adaptive, and experimental approach, iterating toward implementation
• Sequential — with complex services being visualized and orchestrated as a sequence of interrelated actions”
• Real — with needs researched in reality, ideas prototyped in reality, and intangible values evidenced as physical or digital reality
• Holistic — with perspectives of all aspects of a service considered and important

Great services are the result of an iterative process of research, design, and development, capabilities that service economy leaders must master and hardwire into their organizations. And repeat — at scale.

To leap ahead, organizations of all sizes are creating internal innovation and transformation teams to explore and create new digital and cross-channel services to accelerate growth. Through service design, they're combining unmet customer needs and user aspirations with the organization’s core competencies to create new services to accelerate growth.

Smart wirelessly connected toothbrushes, now accompanied by mobile app services that track how long, how hard, and how thoroughly you brush your teeth are great examples of the service revolution.

With these products, beautifully designed apps display sensor information in real-time animations of the mouth, giving users the information they need to practice better oral hygiene.

By augmenting their traditional electric toothbrush with well-designed digital services, Oral-B iO and the top-rated Philips Sonicare Prestige, can now charge upwards of $300, whereas The New York Times Wirecutter’s electric toothbrush picks typically cost $30–50.

NEXT partners with “This is Service Design Doing” and Smaply

With this in mind, NEXT, “This is Service Design Doing”, and experience innovation software Smaply are teaming up to help organizations of all sizes make the most out of the exponentially expanding service economy as it transforms all aspects of our lives.

Our goal is to help service providers create services and imagine experiences that will capture the imagination of users.

Services that remove friction from the world.

Services that make things better — and people happier.

All this at a scale far surpassing the occasional project at the fringe of the organization.

To do so, we have codified the service design principles and methods detailed in the “This Is Service Design Doing” book into templates automated and delivered by NEXT. While the NEXT integration with Smaply lets teams add user journey maps, personas, or stakeholders maps created in Smaply to their projects in NEXT.

This combined offering provides everything you need to scout, research, experiment with, and iterate your new services.

NEXT will continue to provide the digital work environment you and your teams need to record, organize, analyze, share, and present all your service design work.We believe that a software-supported approach will make service design more accessible and actionable to everyone in your organization.

This will result in more people in more companies powering the creation of services and experiences that end users will love.

So — what now?

The industrial economy grew just as the service economy will grow — through great minds, inventiveness, creativity, collaboration, and innovation. By partnering, we at NEXT, “This is Service Design Doing”, and Smaply aim to do our share in helping you create insanely great services.

Sign up for NEXT now, use a “This is Service Design Doing” template, add Smaply maps, and start to grow, grow, grow.

— Moodi (cofounder, NEXT) and Marc (co-founder, Smaply & co-author or This is Service Design Doing)

❤

Grow 10x? Hello, service economy was originally published in To find is the thing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Moodi Mahmoudi (Co-founder & CEO of NEXT) and Andrey Khusid (Co-founder & CEO of Miro) talk about:

• the mass-emergence of distributed teams and remote work
• the rapid adoption of tools that bring people and data together
• the rise of growth practices such as scouting, user research, and continuous experimenting
• the evolution of NEXT and Miro from solutions to platforms (a utility or a marketplace)
• the A-HA moments built into NEXT and Miro for users
• and lots more …

Enterprises are growing faster with NEXT and Miro was originally published in To find is the thing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Can you draw a perfect circle?

For centuries, children, artists, and mathematicians have strived to create a perfect circle by freehand.

Making the world circular is just as hard as drawing a perfect circle. And successfully executing and deploying such projects in an organization is hard too. But the win can be big for those that get it right — as well as for everyone and everything around them.

At its core, the circular economy promotes waste prevention, less pollution (and polluting processes), reuse of materials, and the regeneration of natural systems. Its principles can also be applied to products and services, business models, and economic systems.

In fact, a 2015 study found that a circular economy model could boost Europe’s productivity by 3 percent by 2030, saving €600 billion a year. Companies like Philips have already embraced circular solutions, such as reclaiming all used customer goods to be carbon-neutral.

Still, circular has struggled to go mainstream.

But things are changing. Here is how:

Finding form

Circular meets Design

Circular design is where the circular economy and design [thinking] intersect. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), a voice of authority in the circular economy space, has partnered with IDEO to develop the Circular Design Guide. The guide combines the best of circular economy thought-leadership with the finest in design and innovation to provide designers a structured method for incorporating the principles of the circular economy in their work.

Then, circular design meets software

So, how do you draw the perfect circle?

A compass produces the best circles. And it can do it over and over again.

Comparably, adopting and managing circular design at scale in organizations requires the right tools.

NEXT is that compass.

“There’s a world of opportunity to rethink and redesign the way we make stuff.” — Ellen MacArthur Foundation

NEXT, the digitally-guided business design platform, is pioneering circular design in a new form. The Circular Design Guide, developed by IDEO and Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is now available in the NEXT marketplace. Teams can tap the best of circular design methods directly in the context of their innovation and business transformation projects.

“Software Is Eating the World” wrote Marc Andreessen in his famous essay in the The Wall Street Journal. As our planet sprints towards an uncertain future, organizations will benefit from an actionable, repeatable and scalable approach to circular design:

• End-to-end coverage from Idea-to-Market: NEXT covers the end-to-end scope of circular design projects. It lets organizations capture, nurture, and prioritise the early-stage opportunities. And supports the complete scope of a circular design project that converts the early-stage opportunities into validated and vetted propositions ready for implementation.
• Designed for globally-distributed and remote teams: We live in a global economy with supply chains spanning the world. NEXT’s digitally-guided circular design process, and its platform partnerships with the likes of Miro and Zoom, allows distributed teams to work together effectively. Teams spend less time with logistics and traveling, and more time innovating, transforming, and designing what really matters.
• Faster time-to-market of circular propositions: Rooted in the principles and best practices of circular design, NEXT let’s product managers, purchasers, or marketers innovate and transform like the best innovators do. Making the planet better in the timeframes proposed will require everyone to chip in — and I mean everyone. By keeping circular projects on track and teams productive, NEXT will expedite our collective ability to rethink our offerings faster. And accelerate our time towards saving our planet.

People, planet, and profit

Democratizing circular design has a real impact on the world. It brings a user-centric method that makes the world better for people. It hard-wires a process that protects the planet as a resource. And it creates differentiated business models that make profits.

Adopting circular design has never been easier and more relevant for corporates, nonprofits, or public sector organizations. For example, Amsterdam has put circularity at the heart of its post-Covid strategy. The city is adopting the circular economy model that Kate Raworth from Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute explains in her 2017 bestselling book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist.

“When suddenly we have to care about climate, health, and jobs, housing, care, and communities, is there a framework around that can help us with all of that?” Raworth says. “Yes there is, and it is ready to go.”

In the same respect that business design is a crucial part of good business, circular design is an essential part of better business.

The future looks circular. Expect to see many people designing many perfect circles.

Stop going in circles was originally published in To find is the thing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making business design visual and collaborative for distributed team

Empathy map. User journey. Storyboard. Just a few of the highly visual and collaborative business design tasks in NEXT. These tasks are often synonymous with high-energy in-person creative workshops during which walls are covered with stickies.

Organizations are facing a once-in-every-few-centuries’ disruption. To respond, an increasing number of organizations are adopting business design as an everyday practice to transform their offerings, create new customer experiences, and innovate new disruptive or circular business models. But with hundreds of projects on the go, bringing teams together at every step of the process for workshop-style events isn’t always possible.

Then there is the rise of remote working — 70% of people globally work remotely at least once a week, not to mention the proliferation of distributed teams that rarely meet face to face. You may be working with people in Lagos, New York City, or Shanghai, as well as teams across the road.

“The way work gets done is changing rapidly”, said Moodi Mahmoudi, Cofounder of NEXT. “At NEXT, we wake up every morning to make sure the ‘new normal’ is a better normal.”

That’s why we’re announcing a partnership with Miro, a leading online visual collaborative whiteboarding platform. NEXT’s partnership with Miro means you’ll spend less time traveling and coordinating and more time innovating, transforming, and designing offerings that delight your customers — all remotely.

Here’s how:

Open a note in NEXT and embed a Miro board

You can now bring your Miro board with ideas, user journeys, stakeholder maps, or more into your note. Simply type /command and choose Miro from the drop-down. Paste the link to your Miro board and seamlessly add a creative collaborative layer for your team to work in Miro and NEXT ad the same time.

All your data in one place

Once your work is done in Miro write up the notes of your work in the note in NEXT and highlight relevant insights. All your data in a single place 😌

We’re committed to building the next generation of capabilities that grow growth work. By making it easier for teams to collaborate in visual online whiteboards and bring it together in NEXT, we know we can deliver on our mission of making business design seamless, productive and delightful — remote or in the office.

Stay tuned for more updates here on the blog and by subscribing to our launch notes.

Miro & NEXT: Creating the future of business design — and it’s remote was originally published in To find is the thing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Business design is often synonymous with in-person hackathons, group design thinking classes, and high-energy innovation workshops — a phenomenon Steve Blank equates to innovation theater in his recent Harvard Business Review article.

“Companies and government agencies typically adopt innovation activities (hackathons, design thinking classes, innovation workshops, et al.) that result in innovation theater. These activities shape and build culture, but they don’t win wars, and they rarely deliver shippable/deployable products.”

Organizations are rapidly gearing up to respond to continuous disruption. This means steering away from the occasional innovation theater. Instead, organizations look to hardwire the principles and practices of business design into the fabric of everyday work.

Between a rock and a hard place

Business design is a team sport. As business design grows out of innovation theater and makes its way into everyday work, teams must organize themselves differently — that is, come together a lot more often for a lot less time, intermitted with periods of reflection.

However, the modern workforce is increasingly remote and global. In fact, studies show that 85 percent of knowledge workers work on virtual teams and that 41 percent never meet in person.

And then there is Covid-19. As the coronavirus sweeps across the globe, it is changing how work gets done. With people working from home, organizations are investing heavily in software and technology to build their remote working infrastructure and capabilities. Covid-19 is ushering in a new normal — a remote one, a trend Fast Company argues is here to stay.

The future of business design is software-driven and remote-friendly

Marc Andreessen penned his famous “Why Software Is Eating the World” essay in The Wall Street Journal in 2011. At NEXT, we subscribe to this school of thought. Rooted in design thinking and lean methods, we offer a digitally-guided purpose-built application for business design. Delivered in the cloud, distributed teams at Deloitte, Otis Elevators, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals use NEXT software to spot opportunities in unmet customer needs and innovate breakthrough concepts — remotely or in the office.

Sure, we provide a comprehensive business design platform, but we don’t pretend to be everything to everyone. Over the years, we’ve seen our clients use a number of great applications alongside NEXT. Two of our favorites are Zoom for video conferencing and Miro for online collaborative whiteboarding.

This week we announced partnerships with Zoom and Miro to offer contextual and deep integrations that provide users with a delightful experience across the three applications. We combined our best capabilities to build deep integrations that remove any friction, so the end user doesn’t feel like they are switching between multiple solutions when trying to get work done.

Communicate, collaborate, and create — remotely.

And one more thing…

Thank you. We partnered closely with our customers to co-develop these integrations. Each of you, along with anyone who’s ever written to us with feedback and suggestions, has helped shape these new NEXT experiences. We love you.

Business design is teamwork. When multidisciplinary teams can come together and collaborate easily, they can spot new opportunities in unmet customer needs and innovate breakthrough concepts. That’s why we’re announcing a partnership with Zoom, a leading video communications platform.

“At Zoom, we build happiness into our product suite”, said Oded Gal, Chief Product Officer for Zoom Video Communications.

The Zoom and NEXT partnership means you’ll spend less time on meeting logistics and more time working together with your team transforming your business, innovation new propositions, and creating delightful experiences for your customers.

“Keeping projects going, teams productive, and users delighted is our north star at NEXT”, said Moodi Mahmoudi, Cofounder of NEXT. “May those teams be co-located in the same office or distributed and working remotely.”

Here’s how:

Start your Zoom meetings in NEXT

Getting started with your next design task? Easily start a Zoom meeting with all planned participants at the click of a button. The Zoom and NEXT integration keeps you in the context of your project while bringing face-to-face remote communication to your daily teamwork — all without leaving NEXT.

Bring everyone face to face

Enjoy seamless high-quality video communications from Zoom in NEXT. The in-meeting experience keeps you focused on your work in NEXT while providing frictionless communication capabilities for your team to discuss, create, and iterate.

All your work in one place

Had a great Zoom meeting? Need the recording? We’ve got you covered. For Zoom meetings started in NEXT, recordings are created and attached to your tasks in NEXT. Participants can review any session for more insights. And those that have missed out can easily catchup by replaying a session — at anytime.

Visit NEXT in the Zoom Marketplace for more.

We’re committed to building the next generation of capabilities that power business design in organizations. By making it easier for teams to meet, communicate, and innovate we know we can deliver on our mission of making business design seamless, productive and delightful — remote or in the office. Have fun zooming through their projects.

Stay tuned for more updates here on the blog and by following us on LinkedIn.

There is a common misconception regarding ideas.

Throughout our lives, we’ve been trained to give them. When we are students, our teachers want them. When we grow older and enter the professional world, so do our bosses. And when it comes to innovation, everyone is also looking for ideas.

People think — and rightly so — that ideas can literally change the world. Ideas are the cornerstone on which progress hinges.

But all too often, we think of an idea as a light in the dark, a rescuer, arriving unexpectedly at our time of greatest need. We view ideas as magic. They will solve everything. They will save us.

So much so that some companies spend big money just to use software centered around summoning ideas. Top analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester have allocated top minds and manpower to evaluate these softwares, and rank them into quadrants and charts.

When it comes to ideas, it seems, everyone is aiming for the chance to catch lightning in a bottle. For the chance to capture an “aha!” moment.

Maybe, every now and then, this is possible.

The problem is that we’re looking at ideas, our “a-ha!” moments, inside-out, when we should be looking outside-in. A reliance on internal ideas that come to us — that are inconsistent and anchored in personal bias — means that we are essentially dancing with ourselves. All the while, the world is changing, moving on, progressing.

We need to be focusing on our customers — their wants, their needs — rather than ourselves and what we want to (or can) do.

It’s human to believe that there is an easy way out, a master key that unlocks the solutions to the most difficult problems in our lives. That’s understandable, if a little naïve. That’s also why the entire concept of lightning-in-a-bottle idea management is the adult professional’s equivalent to believing in Santa.

While we are searching for ideas, innovation and transformation is suffering. We are overlooking vast potential on account of baseless, albeit well-meaning, expectations. It’s important to remember, after all, that a recent McKinsey Study shows 84 percent of executives believe innovation is critical to their success, while only six percent are satisfied with actual innovation performance. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again — that’s a 92 percent performance gap!

So what if we stop looking for ideas, and start looking for problems?

Questions, not answers

Not enough of our resources (manpower, money, you name it) are devoted to uncovering and understanding the problems and needs of the ones who matter most: the users of the products and services we offer.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

That’s Albert Einstein, talking about an 11:1 ratio of time spent focused on problems and solutions. Crazy, right? Not at all. Having pitched at hundreds of VC meetings over the course of the three startups I’ve founded, I’ve come to realize that no one cares about your idea. Instead, everyone wants to know that YOU have identified a problem. What is it? How big? How many people have it? How painful or irritating is it to the customer? Why does it exist?

While one might think that the most innovative companies currently in existence were created with a strike of genius, many (if not all) were and continue to be focused on problems rather than solutions, or ideas.

“We run this company on questions, not answers.” — Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

Defining the problem, figuring out where (and why) to start — that’s where you’ll find the essence of success.

So let’s sober up. Let’s stop believing in fairy tales and do this right.

There are no silver bullets. There are no love potions. There’s no Easter bunny. Even though it would be great if these things did exist.

The best practices of design thinking clearly outline that transformation and innovation must start with understanding and defining the problems facing you and your team. But if we are to change our approach to innovation, shifting away from starting with an idea to instead starting with insights and user needs, we are going to have to forget what we think we know.

Unlearn to relearn

In his Harvard Business Review piece, “Why the Problem with Learning is Unlearning,” writer and Shift Thinking founder and CEO Mark Bonchek states that when organizations begin to think they know everything, they begin to fail.

“The place to start is by unlearning how we think about learning,” he writes.

“Unlearning” what we think we know allows us to create space to uncover new needs and insights — to “relearn.”

Here is the real trigger for innovation, that spark we are all seeking. And that’s why ideas aren’t the answer, questions are. Your innovation process and software shouldn’t start with collecting ideas. It should start by pushing you out into the real world to gather problems, insights, user needs. This will allow your teams to innovate propositions rooted in what your customers need and desire.

So let’s start asking questions. Let’s shift our focus to learning and relearning rather than lightning bolts. Let’s identify the incredibly valuable insights and user needs of our customers. Let’s uncover the problems that beg to be solved.

This will allow us to identify converging trends that lay the foundation for the never-before-seen. We’ll be forging ahead, tracking the Next Big Thing.

We won’t be hoping for sudden inspiration. For our lightning-in-a-bottle moment. For an idea.

We’ll be hoping for problems.

Contributing editor: Adam Kohut

Ideas suck was originally published in To find is the thing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First, a story.

Together, the Kellogg brothers ran a sanitarium and health spa in Battle Creek, Michigan. They were guided by the principles of their fundamentalist religious beliefs — among them the denial of carnal pleasures and the adherence to a strict vegetarian diet.

One day, while making dough for bread, the brothers were called away to attend to pressing business. Hours later, they returned to dough that had gone hard, crusty. Stale.

As waste was considered sinful, the brothers decide to process it anyway, rolling the dough out flat and baking it.

The resulting tiny, crunchy flakes were served to the members of their church, and were an immediate hit. Those flakes soon became known as “cornflakes” — the very same as those that are eaten and enjoyed at millions of breakfast tables around the world.

OK, so what?

At Next, we’re all about triggering and perpetuating a childlike sense of wonder. If you aren’t curious, if you aren’t asking questions, if you aren’t wondering why? Well, you aren’t innovating.

When children ask questions, however, they aren’t just asking questions. They aren’t just learning. They’re also having fun. They’re playing.

The same goes for you — while innovating, you should be having fun. You should be playing.

“It’s play that makes people unafraid to fail and confident to try new things. It’s play that helps us do serious things better because we enjoy them and feel a sense of joy in our achievements.”

That quote comes from Jake Orlowitz, the head of the Wikipedia Library, Wikimedia Foundation. Truer words have never been spoken. If we are to truly take innovation to the next level, we must make sure we are enjoying ourselves, creating memorable experiences that will ride on our proverbial shoulders. We should be talking about these experiences with our friends, our families, our colleagues — not because we have to, but because we love to.

This is why it is so important that innovation be as much play as work.

Here’s where the story of cornflakes’ origin comes into play. Imagine making individual contributions to something that matters within your organization. Imagine your voice always being heard, by hundreds, even thousands, of your colleagues. Imagine catching the attention of the higher-ups in your organization, and having your Signal turned into the Next Big Thing.

Imagine creating the next cornflakes.

With Signals, we aim to allow you to accomplish that. And along the way, we aim to inspire you, to ensure that you want to continue innovating.

Badge(s) of honor

A focus on play means that everything we do at Next is gamified — including the Signals app.

This is why we’ve included “Innovation Stories Worth Telling” in Signals. As you progress, posting signals into Themes and helping to strengthen those posted by others, you will earn one of many badges, each signifying a certain in-app milestone. Those badges, in part, help generate a sense of achievement.

But alone, a badge is not enough. No, they must have substance. They must be filling.

No one’s going home at night, and, over dinner, saying something like, “Honey, you’ll never guess what innovation badge I earned today.” We’d never expect that of anyone, either. We understand people are busy, and smart, and aren’t going to be fooled by a digital image into having fun.

Each badge, however, when earned, also unlocks a story. These stories range in topic, but center around a great innovation, and how that innovation came about. One of those stories, of course, details how the Kellogg brothers created cornflakes.

We’ll also reveal how popsicles were invented, the story behind the first brandy, and much, much more.

These are stories you’ll want to share with others. They will stick with you long after you’ve left the office. They’re inspiring, fun, and, perhaps best of all, relevant to the task at hand. Once you have a taste, you’ll almost surely be back for more. That’s what Signals does: turns work into play — and play into value for your organization.

The Signals app will also always be free, because we believe in equal opportunity innovation.

So no more delays. No more planning.

It’s time to start innovating.

Playtime has begun.

Contributing editor: Adam Kohut