Not Invented Here

I mean Picasso had a saying:
good artists copy, great artists steal.
And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Tips for better questions
Refuse to accept the current reality
Invite outsiders to ask questions about your work and your industry
Imagine the perfect situation
Detect real customer insights by analysing their actual behaviour
Challenge everything; don’t base yourself on industry assumptions
Most complaints can be translated into positive questions
Time-travel and ask yourself questions about your business now
As children are the R&D department of humanity: perceive with naive (child-like) eyes

The trick is to make sure you interview new people—ask them about their observations, what they think is strange or special—before their first 100 days are over, after that people tend to be in full compliance (read: understand the jargon).

Instead of jumping to the right answer—first focus on discovering the right question.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
— Albert Einstein

We can take a cue from Eric Vogts’ book: The Art of Powerful Questions.
Powerful questions:
generate curiosity in the listener
are thought-provoking
surface underlying assumptions
channel attention
focus inquiry
stimulate reflective conversation
generate energy
evoke more questions

Not invented here
The not invented here syndrome actually holds people back from using ideas, concepts and approaches from other domains.
It’s our plea to embrace other people’s and other sector’s ideas and build upon them. This way not invented here becomes already invented there.

. CREATE
The ability to make it fit your situation.
It is not survival of the fittest, but rather the best fitting. This step ensures that you make it fit: adapt, modify, customise it to your situation. Adopt what you can, adapt the rest.—Ask: how?

The ability to make smart combinations.
Use lateral thinking to find matches and similarities. Seeing the (potential) parallels in order to organise a profitable meeting of contexts. Search for elegant inspiration.
—Ask: what if?

The ability to conceptualise.
Become more flexible in asking questions on multiple levels. Play with abstraction levels. Get help from curators and conduct in-depth research.—Ask: why?