You must have seen the festive puzzle with nine dots (three dots in three rows)

o o o

o o o

o o o

and your task is to trace through all the dots in four straight lines without lifting your pen from the page? (The solution is below.)

What does this teach us about creative solutions? Well if we allow ourselves to be limited by what appears to be the box made up of the outside dots, we cannot solve the puzzle. However if we challenge our apparent limitations and several of the lines begin or finish outside the box, the solution is easy and obvious.

How different will tomorrow's products be?

The other day when I was working with a client whose products are successful today. I felt that this was (naturally) constraining her thoughts and she was having difficulty in seeing her customers needs with fresh eyes. I used this dotty puzzle to help her recognise that how success was condemning her to incrementally improve her products rather than radically replace them. She could then see that new entrants to her industry can see what her customers want and are already designing tomorrow's products.

How do you change your innovative focus?

As we talked and worked on this insight, my client made three new resolutions:

• Iwill ask my customers what their issues are and what they want to improve.
• I will suspend my judgement and listen to my customers' ideas and comments carefully.
• I will be curious about their reasons for the features they want and learn from the benefits they are looking for.

We then designed an innovation program where my client approached a dozen of her key customers and spent a couple of hours with each of them, asking for their ideas and listening to the help they gave.

How do you handle the missing information?

Having listened to her customers, we still had gaps in the information we needed to design the new products. For many small businesses, many decisions are taken with incomplete information because they do not have the time or resources to research decisions fully before taking them.

So we adopted four more resolutions (in order of discomfort) to help us flesh out the skeletal ideas we had:

• Let us guess lucky about the missing information - we can fill gaps with several alternatives and check how permutations of these guesses work as we develop our ideas.
• We can think how greed and fear may bias our ideas - then we can construct best and worst cases for the performance targets.
• We can brainstorm the choices other companies might use - and use our experience with our competitors to help us get ahead.
• We can choose our box and decide what limitations to accept - by changing our question, we ourselves to get a find answer.

How to put this into practice?

If what I have said about innovation is a foreign language, please do not ignore it; find someone to help you understand it because my experience shows that this approach to product innovation is important.

If you need a clue to solving the puzzle: draw three lines from the top left corner, allowing the vertical and horizontal lines to extend outside the box, then draw a diagonal line through the untouched dots to join these two 'out of the box' lines.

I hope this puzzle has stirs you to taking a new view on your problems - I really enjoy coaching business people who create wealth through new ideas.