4 Lenses of Innovation
By asking how the world’s top innovators—Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and many others—came up with their game-changing ideas, bestselling author Rowan Gibson identifies four key business perspectives that will enable you to discover groundbreaking opportunities for innovation and growth:

1. Challenging Orthodoxies—What if the dominant conventions in your field, market, or industry are outdated, unnecessary, or just plain wrong?
2. Harnessing Trends—Where are the shifts and discontinuities that will, now and in the future, provide the energy you need for a major leap forward?
3. Leveraging Resources—How can you arrange existing skills and assets into new combinations that add up to more than the sum of their parts?
4. Understanding Needs—What are the unmet needs and frustrations that everyone else is simply ignoring?

Take-Aways
1. Before the Renaissance, people attributed creative genius to divine forces outside the human domain. The Renaissance embraced the power of the individual mind.
2. Patterns organize your understanding of the world. They can also limit your thinking.
3. Anyone can produce new ideas by using the “four lenses of innovation.”
4. Generate innovation using the lens of “challenging orthodoxies” to overturn old beliefs.
5. Seek fresh strategies by “harnessing trends” as signals of upcoming change.
6. The lens of “leveraging resources” helps you innovate with the knowledge and materials you already have.
7. Look through the lens of “understanding needs” to see what your customers want and to provide it, even if they don’t know what they want until you offer it.
8. To innovate, first define your problem, research and work on it until you hit a wall, take a break, generate an insight, develop that into a big idea and test your new concept.
9. To innovate more effectively, apply the four lenses on a large, extended scale.
10. Assign multiple development teams to use each lens to generate meaningful, fresh ideas, and create a “portfolio of strategic insights.”