If you work in a specific job role in an organisation, sector, or perhaps even a specific niche within sustainability, you’ll know that within those sectors and niches, there are always various annual award ceremonies.
Organisations then go for these awards, often describing a case study which solves a certain problem that the industry is facing. This is a rich stream of gold for mining ideas because what you have is organisations talking in detail about a problem they faced and how they solved it internally. Details are diamonds.
The people who created the solution and the resulting case study usually did it ad hoc. They built a solution using the resources available to them. What you’ve got to do is look at that case study, identify the problem and how big it is, and ask whether other solutions for the problem already exist in the marketplace. At an awards ceremony, generally, the ideas are new and innovative.
Look at the winners, the runners up, and the other entrants, and ask ‘Could that problem be scaled up across the sector?’ For example, with Warp It, we know that there are award ceremonies every year around sustainability, waste management, and reuse. There’s always an award surrounding reuse. We know we are a massive reuse solution, but there are still smaller projects trying to do reuse on their own. If Daniel hadn’t come up with the idea for Warp It, he might be looking at the reuse award and saying ‘we could combine these ideas and build up some reuse software’. Luckily, he got there first.
When you’re doing your researching, you’ve got to read case studies from various awards going back over the last few years and build up a picture of who, or what is winning awards. What gets runners up prizes? What are the common problems? How are people building their solutions?
After reading 20, or even 30 case studies all about problem-solving and innovation, you’re suddenly going to have the ammunition and information required in order to come up with your own scalable ideas.
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