Scott Amyx

Your boss tells you to create the next multi-million dollar blockbuster product. After all, you are the expert. Yet, no matter how much your team tries to think outside-of-the-box, your innovation iterations can’t seem to break through the legacy product. Sure it has better bells and whistles but at the end of the day, it’s still the same widget with a new name.

Scott shares that companies can systematically achieve better innovation outcomes by utilizing a combination of crowdsourcing and AI computation to create serendipity. Great ideas don’t have to occur once in a blue moon; it can happen consistently. Scott asserts that great ideas are inspired from other domains. Using a proven research-based methodology, Scott helps your organization to solve highly complex product development and innovation projects by utilizing the symbiosis of human-machine innovation.

How are decisions made in your organization? We like to believe that we make optimal decisions based on group consensus. According to research, even the best orchestrated consensus thinking is less creativity than the sum of their members. By definition, consensus is a general agreement among members of a group. In order to reach consensus, there are trade-offs. We start out with a complex problem with many dimensions, much like a heptagon with 100 sides. As concessions are made, the once jagged polygon smooths out to a simple rounded polygon with less sides. What we get is something not dissimilar from what others have already come up with, including our competitors. We fail to achieve a breakthrough.

Scott shares that in order to produce superior decision-making, organizations must embrace authentic dissenting viewpoints. Based on research, Scott indicates that when a team member shares a dissenting viewpoint, the creativity of the group increases. Dissent stimulates thought that is divergent, and leads to greater innovation and creativity. It improves the quality of decision-making. We become more independent thinkers and, more importantly, we think divergently.

There is an exciting new project kicking off at your work. So naturally, you start with requirements gathering. You hold a series of requirements gathering working sessions with stakeholders and users. The questions are generally oriented towards “what do you want?” However, this is highly problematic, especially if this is a new product or service. Matter of fact, asking your target customers what they want might even lead to disastrous results.

Scott presents the concepts of benefit-oriented and emotion-oriented requirements methodologies that will not only sharpen your requirements process but produce a profoundly innovative solution that will be lauded and loved by your customers. A benefits-oriented approach summarizes the greatest user needs to the highest abstraction level. It forces us to lift our eyes up from granularity of feature set to see the big picture. An emotion-oriented requirements approach increases user adoption, engagement and ultimate success of a new product or service by focusing on the underlying human emotional goals.