‘Opportunity is all around us, but it often occurs in the most unlikely of places’
I’m writing this at 37,000 feet above the Indian Ocean, and in an extraordinary act of serendipity I glance at the screen in front of me to hear these words. Words from an Indian textile entrepreneur who finds the inspiration for his next design on the key fob of a taxi driver in a cab in Sao Paulo.

He was simply open to the stimulus. Prepared to look beyond the usual sources of inspiration for his industry. He has a different outlook, and he knows that this is a sense – like seeing, hearing, smelling – that he can practise and refine.

Put simply, Outlooking is a skill you can learn to help you see opportunity. And many great Challenger stories start with an act of Outlooking.

‘Important Job Offer – Inexperience Wanted’
One would think that the more experience you have, the more easy it is to see opportunity. So that when you want to solve a problem, the most natural solution is to get a whole bunch of experienced people in a room and run at the issue. Experience = Knowledge and Insight…surely?

Yes, but…Experience can blind us too. Experience tells us that there are ‘rules’ and ‘codes’. We believe we know what can or can’t be done. We become closed to things that don’t fit our model of the world – the model that is based on years of experience.

However, many of the challenger stories we have researched, start with In-experience – people who have no experience of the business that they are going into, or deliberately bring a perspective from another industry or category. People with intelligent Naivety.

If you don’t believe me, consider the feelings you have in the first few days in a new job. Certainly a little fear, but also huge excitement and clarity of thought. You have the energy to change things for the better. You see things with fresh eyes, and a million questions – small and large – occur to you.
‘why do they segment the category that way?’
‘why can’t people buy the products directly?’
‘couldn’t we sell things cheaper and yet make more profit?’
‘why are we structured this way?’
‘couldn’t I bring some of my knowledge from other jobs to this industry?’

But as time passes, and you become more ‘experienced’ , the questions recede and you come to understand ‘how things work’ in your category or business. And as your sense of certainty increases, the energy and enthusiasm wane a little.
You’ve lost your intelligent naivety. You’ve stopped looking out.

Regaining our Intelligent Naivety
So, what skills and techniques can we adopt to regain our intelligent naivety?

Look beyond the borders of your own category for Inspiration
Many of our favourite challengers practise this. Jonathan Ive, the Chief Designer at Apple, often applies this principle. In revolutionising the aesthetics of the computer world with the iMac he found that the industry was incapable of producing truly vibrant translucent plastics. He turned to a confectionery maker for advice and inspiration. The iMac was often described as ‘yummy’ looking as a result – ‘a gumdrop of a computer’.

Appearing on main streets around the world are Lush cosmetics stores. These are not the sanitised marble clad white environments that we find in department stores but more resemble a green grocer or a deli. As theatres of colour and sensory overload, they look nothing like other cosmetics stores. The inspiration can be traced to an entirely different category.

Add a new emotion to people’s experience of the category
When you think ‘computer services’, you don’t immediately think cool or fun. But for anyone who has encountered an original Geek Squad agent, you will recognise the power and loyalty driving potential of that business, as they turn up in their Geek Squad cars looking like something from ‘Men in Black’, and flash their agent badge before fixing your hard drive. Geek Squad really does put ‘cool’ into IT.

Or who could have thought that socks could be scary. Burlington recently parodied the horror genre to make their iconic socks more relevant to a younger generation, http://sockhorror.burlington.de/ .

Attach your story to a bigger issue – something to set tongues wagging
In Europe the diesel car is well established. In North America less so, where – despite all the huge advances in these engines, and the mileage benefits – it still carries a reputation for dirtiness, noise and a lack of performance.

Despite this, Audi in North America believe the diesel market will grow and offers huge potential. They were clear however that the traditional rational arguments for diesel engines were falling on deaf ears. With the launch of the Audi Q7, they chose a different story to engage with. They identified that if 30% of Americans shifted to diesel in the US, then American would no longer need to rely on Saudi Arabia for any oil. They expected some 10% of their sales to be diesel vehicles. In fact, over 40% of their sales have been diesel.

Flip the conventions of the category
Sometimes people associate being a Challenger with breaking every rule and code out there. We wouldn’t ever recommend that but…as a place to start a process of looking for new opportunity and a way to outlook…you can do worse than list all the category conventions you can think of, then flip them and ask the question – ‘Is there any potential benefit in seeing a category convention from the other side of the coin?’

One of the greatest examples of this was Saturn cars – ‘A different kind of car company’ – who inverted many of the conventions of the car industry in the USA: from where it was made, to how it was sold, to the emphasis on a great ownership experience. Saturn was an off shoot of General Motors and achieved such success for a time that its parent company struggled to reconcile managing two very different business models. But the freshness of thinking that led to Saturn can also be seen in the inspiring interview with Hugo Spowers of Riversimple on the site this month.

The business model success of Ryan Air is inspired by similar thinking – flying into regional airports, making revenues from helping to develop those airports rather than paying exorbitant landing fees, and even charging for spending a penny. Flipping irritating at one level, yet flipping successful too.

You can see another great example of a business that has flipped conventions in the interview with Gav Thompson of giff gaff.

Outlooking is a skill to nurture
Challenger success depends on the ability to be open to opportunity. Always. To do this we need to recognise that experience can be a constraint at times rather than an enabler. We need to find ways to systematically regain our intelligent naivety.

Outlooking and the techniques we have touched on here, forces us to put on new lenses. It forces us to see the world from a different perspective, and opens the senses to new possibilities.

Some challengers seem to be permanent outlookers; for the rest of us it is a skill we can practise.

Hugh Derrick is a partner at eatbigfish.