Let's turn now to the practical steps we can take to boost innovation. And that present a four stage approach to you firstly to identify the areas where you need to innovate. Secondly, to form an innovation team, and start fact finding. Thirdly, to generate ideas for innovation. Fourthly, to test your ideas and select the best stage one, then, identify areas where you need to innovate, you should get a management team together, the team should include individuals who can authorize work to develop and progress new ideas, and ask the team four questions to begin with. Where are our core products and services on the product lifecycle?
Which ones are nearing the decline stage? Which of our business processes damage customer value, and where How could we create a more engaging and innovative workplace global trends, which will appear on next slide will impact our business in the next five to 10 years. So brainstorm these questions with this group, put up post it notes, and create an action list of ideas where improvements and innovation are needed. To quote Patrick Dixon in the book building a better business 2005. The paradox of innovation is this. CEOs often complain about lack of innovation, while workers often say leaders are hostile to new ideas.
And that comes back to the idea of creating a culture for innovation, which we discussed earlier. With the group then you spend a couple of hours looking at your products and services on the lifecycle and on the Boston matrix to see where they are to see where they are on the product lifecycle. To see if you need to develop new products, new markets, should look at your business processes and what customers don't like about them. What customers say You should improve about them. Look at your workplace. How can people be more engaged with innovation within the workplace and look at global trends, see what will impact on the business.
And we're going to look at global trends affecting business just now. The company, Ipsos Mori is a polling and market research business. They've conducted research into the global trends affecting business going forward into the future. And I've given the source for that at the bottom of the slide there. The 10 global trends that they have identified are as follows. Firstly, that the population is growing and expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050.
And that growth will mainly be in Africa, and the growing population brings opportunities in terms of growing marketplace, but also threats in terms of pressure on resources and so on. The second global trend is related and is about growing opportunity, but also growing inequality, the number of people different As middle class is expected to reach 5 billion by 2030, and 66% of those will be based in Asia. Thirdly, we have the growth of mega cities. 66% of the population are expected to be living in cities by 2050. And the number of huge cities that there are, is growing dramatically. Fourth, we have increased connectivity, but also decreasing privacy, increasing access to the internet.
And also the Internet of Things means that many more people in the marketplace will be connected to the Internet, and therefore kind of online and available for products and services. But this also means that our data will be more at risk than ever before and our privacy will be reduced. Fifth, we have a healthier population and also a sicker population, meaning that life expectancy increases but this brings with it new health problems including obesity and the illnesses that come up with older age. Increasing life expectancy also means that our finances will be more under pressure than before. The sixth global trend is the rise of individual choice, and the fracturing of the mass market. The Internet, and increasing individualism mean that we all want products and services that are slightly different and better suited to our own particular needs.
And this means that the mass market model of production and marketing doesn't apply as strongly as it used to. This brings new opportunities for businesses, particularly niche businesses. But it also brings problems for larger organizations who are used to the mass market model. The seventh global trend is related. And it's about the rise of the individual and the decline of social cohesion. So single person households are growing and people have a much more individualistic outlook in terms of the products and services that they consume and how they live.
Their lives, it also means a sense of community and of group spirits declines. The eighth global trend is that cultures begin to converge as everyone sees the same things on the internet and on television. But also as the previous trends illustrated, there's increasing individualism and this leads to more extreme cultural pushback and reaction on the part of some groups and individuals. Ninth, we have the fact that soon everyone will be permanently on the grid, and it will be difficult to switch off and this will lead to pressures of work intruding into our private lives and our personal lives. It will lead to problems with the work life balance and fear of constantly having to be online and respond to managers and bosses. This pressure is not good for our mental health.
Final global trend is the emergence of public opinion as a revolutionary force to satisfy traction with governments is increasing and popular campaigns and fringe movements come increasingly to the fore. We've seen this very recently with extinction rebellion. And with activism in Hong Kong, for example, public protests and citizen led campaigns are becoming much more powerful. Those are the 10 global trends affecting business according to Ipsos Mori, wonder which will affect your organization. Stage two in our approach to boost innovation is to form an innovation team of eight to 12 people selected from across the organization. These people do not need to be senior, but they do need to have extensive experience of the organization, its products, services and processes.
The team should talk to your customers. What do those customers want more of in terms of your products, services and processes? And what do they want less of? What are the pain points for them in your processes? What about your processes products or services? Do they dislike Talk also to the staff ation team need to get close to staff across the organization in order that they might review the products, services and processes of the organization and identify those areas where Improvement and Innovation is most needed.
Next, the team need to identify specifically which aspects of those products, services and processes need to improve. As Michael Grade said, in 1997, innovation implies high risk and with high risk comes failure. So you've got to be prepared for that. In summary, then the areas that the innovation team might look at for innovation include new products and markets, better business processes, a more innovative workplace, improving customer value, a new or revised business model, and adapting to the global and emergent trends. Stage three then of our approach Is that the innovation team generates ideas. Once we have a priority list of the specific aspects of products, services and processes that need to improve, we need to generate ideas for innovation.
Those ideas may be big, for example, a new product and a new market. Or they may be small, changing the order input screen to make it easier for staff to use. We should be open and welcoming for ideas of all sizes. We don't want to stifle innovation at this stage, and how can we generate ideas for innovation? Well, here are some thoughts. Firstly, think of the issue from different points of view.
What would help each stakeholder group for example, what could you do to provide something new and better for customers? For example? How could you improve the process or actions for staff? And what about for the wider community? Secondly, in innovation, we should always focus on the customer. So what would your customers really like to see what would improve service for them.
Third, what prevents the problem or issue identified from being resolved right now? What are the barriers to fixing it? And what other ways around the barriers might there be? fourthly use the Ishikawa diagram to drill down to the root cause of the problem. And we'll discuss the Ishikawa Diagram very shortly. And finally, get a bit silly, identify really radical ways of dealing with the issue, and then refine the idea to something more practical.
To quote Linus Pauling. If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas, most of them will be wrong. And what you have to learn is which ones to throw away. I mentioned the Ishikawa Diagram a few moments ago. And along with process mapping, it's my favorite tool for Improvement and Innovation. The Ishikawa diagram is also called the fishbone diagram because of its shape, and essentially we're analyzing a problem into different categories and the six traditional categories are materials methods, measurement, people, machines, and Mother Nature.
And looking at a problem from these different aspects really helps to analyze what the issues might be with a process or activity. So for example, under measurement, we might look at how the way we collect data, how the way we define our measures, we look at how these things might be impacting on the problem in terms of methods or our procedures or our training somehow impacting on the problem creating the problem and the materials we look at if the materials that are used in the process may be part of the problem. And the people is it skills issues or recruitment issues or other HR issues that are affecting the problem and machines Is it something about the equipment that we use the impacts on the problem or causes the problem in terms of Mother Nature, other environmental issues which are creating problems don't have to stick with just these six branches, I often find it useful to use a branch titled management and policies, because often it's corporate policies or the approach and attitude of management which causes some of the problems.
And if an organization is heavily reliant on IT systems, then we probably want to branch headed it separate from the machines branch. Once we've identified a lot of ideas, then we want to be able to identify the best ones. And that's the purpose of stage four and our approach to boosting innovation. stage four is headed testing. Testing will have generated a lot of ideas for improving key products, services, and processes or for creating new ones. Now we need to select the best ideas and the tool we use to do this is called the innovation grid.
The innovation grid comprises two axes. One axis is the range from easy to implement, to hard to implement, and the other axis This is the range from small potential benefits for the organization to large potential benefit. So the group should get together, and best guess where each idea lies on the axis between whether it's easy to implement, or whether the idea is hard to implement, then the group should also agree where the idea lies on the axis between small potential benefit from the idea, or large potential benefits. The cost of delivering an idea is generally related to its ease of implementation, which is why we don't have a separate cost grid. To complicate things, the potential benefit of an idea can be hard to estimate at this stage when we haven't gone into them in great detail. So we should group the ideas into sort of small, medium or large potential benefit, and that will suffice for the innovation grid, to quote to George polio from his book, how to solve it published in 1945.
The best of ideas is hurt by uncritical Acceptance and thrives on critical examination. And the purpose of this stage is to examine each idea critically and see which are going to impact most effectively and which are going to be easy to implement. The next slide shows the innovation grid with its axes as I said, between easy to implement and hard to implement, between large benefit and small potential benefit. All of the ideas that are easy to implement should be progressed immediately. A detailed cost benefit analysis is not necessary. These are easy ideas which can be put in place with minimum effort.
Those ideas which have a large potential benefit, but which are hard to implement, do need more detailed analysis to see how feasible they can be. And any ideas which are hard to implement, but which have low potential benefit should be eliminated. They're not worth the effort.