The other week, I was in Beijing facilitating a company offsite. The company had absolutely no operations in Beijing, and no plans to start operations there. It is a disciplined operator, so this wasn’t a junket either. So, what was the company doing in Beijing? It was smartly spending time at the periphery of its industry.

One of the challenges facing market leaders is that transformational trends are only obvious when it is too late. Transformation typically starts in seemingly disconnected industries, or as innocent offerings targeting completely different customer segments.

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Remember how after Chemical Bank launched the first Automated Teller Machine in the 1960s, waves of bank branches shut down? And remember when banks went online, how waves of local bank branches shut down?

Oh wait.

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“Our new service tested off the charts — more than 5% of customers we surveyed said they would buy it,” one reader at a not-for-profit organization emailed me. “We launched it. The results were disappointing.”

Remember, customers lie. Not maliciously, but they lie. The reader learned that lesson the hard way. For his next idea he wanted to run a transaction-oriented test, but struggled with how to design and execute one.

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Innovators have to deal with particularly insidious lies — things that people say that they believe are true, but actually aren’t.

Lie #1: Target customer, “Of course I’ll buy that.”

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June’s Harvard Business Review features a story by Procter & Gamble Chief Technology Officer Bruce Brown and me on “How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate.” The article’s core message is that P&G achieved that result by approaching the creation of new growth businesses in a highly systematic way, building what Brown and I call the “new-growth factory.”

I hope that people find the article, which describes our journey and the lessons we learned, to be useful. I thought I would use today’s post to answer three of the most common questions that people have asked me about the article’s ideas.

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Our eyes are underrated innovation tools. It’s easy to get caught up in a whirlwind of activities and miss opportunities that are literally right in front of your face. Make a regular habit of just standing and watching. You may be surprised by what you see.

Here’s how it worked for me recently. This Monday, I was in Mumbai conducting market research with a project team. A couple of my colleagues were interviewing a consumer on the street in a pretty well-to-do neighborhood. The interview was in Hindi and we didn’t want to slow it down with simultaneous translation.

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One tried-and-true innovation trick is to look for analogies. When you feel like you’re working on an intractable problem, find someone who has already solved the problem, but in a different context. Apply their learning to your situation, and see where it takes you.

Let’s practice by using this approach on the act of innovation itself. What do innovators do? At a basic level, they transform a blank piece of paper into a successful growth business. Can you think of anyone else who faces the same challenge? Architects would seem to fit the bill.

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Here’s a silly thought for you. Imagine that the Washington Capitals were looking for an edge in the upcoming ice hockey playoffs (that’s not the silly part, hold on a second). They get a call from someone, saying “I’d like to bring my talents to the hockey rink.” The caller reveals himself to be basketball superstar LeBron James. Should they sign him?

Unless the Capitals were looking for a publicity gimmick, the answer would be a very clear no. While James is a once-in-a-generation basketball talent, the odds that he would be even passable at professional ice hockey would be quite low. The skills required to play hockey are very different from those required to play basketball. He would have to train in completely different ways, and unlearn many of the things that have allowed him to succeed at his chosen sport.

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Over Christmas, my wife and I were shopping for a present for our three-year-old daughter, Holly.

“She seems to really like working with you on your laptop,” my wife said (clients who notice strange typos in emails . . . blame Holly!). “Why don’t we get her a toy that encourages that interest so she’ll be more familiar with the technology as she gets older?”

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The other week I was helping the leadership team of an intriguing startup in Shanghai grapple with an interesting question: What’s next? The company’s core offering was coming together nicely, but it knew that long-term success required developing new products, services, and platforms. The team had tons of ideas, but wasn’t sure which ones it should prioritize.

This is a common problem inside large companies as well. While corporate leaders sometimes think that they lack good ideas, more often their real challenge is to quickly separate good ideas from bad ones.

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