One of the best ways to keep on your toes and at the top of your game is to implement what I call an Innovation Throwdown. Based on the concept popularized by celebrity chef Bobby Flay (it's a hit Food Network television program) where he challenges cooks renowned for a specific dish or type of cooking to a cook-off of their own signature dish. After practicing and preparing the item in question, Flay shows up for a surprise competition (or Throwdown). During the competition, both chefs prepare their particular version of the dish, and both are then evaluated by local judges to determine a winner.

Even if Flay wins, the bottom line is that he performs a great service that benefits his guest chef. Usually, these chefs have created a very good dish, good enough to assure success on the local scene, but have often stopped innovating because they're afraid to mess up a good thing or failed to broaden their menu with more signature dishes. Flay goads them with cameras rolling, which generates a little adrenaline; these chefs up their game, usually improvising with a little bacon at the last minute. Win or lose, it teaches the chef that another level of excellence is possible. It's a win-win game because Flay is constantly honing and refining his competitive edge and learning from everyone. It's fun and stimulates all the good things about competition, and everyone gets something yummy to eat.

An Innovation Throwdown is produced in much the same way. In general, a company hires a team of professional innovators to challenge its own best developers to grow, stretch, and learn that another level of excellence and creativity is possible. Ideally, bring in world class talent, if that's what you aspire to benchmark yourself against. However, you can even do it internally, by assembling your best innovators to challenge other innovation teams to step up their creativity. For fun, add a bit of adrenaline by putting a time limit on the process, like a 24-hour charette, or shoot a "reality show" type video around the event.

So how do you win a throwdown? When I produce a throwdown for a client, the core technique I use is something I call multi-visioning, or turning the viewpoint while brainstorming. Like a sculpture that needs to be turned to capture all perspectives, an idea needs to be rotated to fill itself out. Hence, we start with everyone contributing ideas until the ideation momentum winds down, and then we start turning the viewpoint. When the initial ideas subside, it's like emptying the teacup; it's only then that true innovation can begin, when we start multi-visioning.

So how do we turn the perspective? Simply by asking a question that leads the group ideation down a different path. Maybe we ask: "So how does the customer see it." "Hey, how can we enlarge this idea, maybe turn it into a world-class idea." "How can we open it up, maybe do open systems thinking here"? In general, to beat the other team, you have to have a better facilitator, better innovators in the room, more perspectives than they do, and then remove whatever holds you back.

I developed this multi-visioning technique during research in the psychology of creativity. The actual a-ha! moment came to me while reading the journals of Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci believed that to solve a problem, you begin by learning how to restructure it in many different ways. He felt that the first way he looked at a problem was usually too biased. With each "shift in his mind," his understanding would deepen and he would begin to understand the essence of the problem.

I followed up that discovery by reading some works by Albert Einstein, and remembering a lecture from college by the physicist Richard Feynman. Einstein said that he found it necessary to formulate his problem in as many different ways as possible, using diagrams and visuals. Feynman felt the secret to his genius was his ability to disregard how past thinkers thought about problems and, instead, "invent new ways to think." He called it "generating different ways to look at the problem, until you find a way that moves the imagination." What these geniuses did is invent new ways to invent--in Feynman's lecture, he related a time when he had to create a new kind of fractional base mathematics to solve a thorny problem.

Therefore, the secret sauce for innovating at a higher level is to come up with fresh perspectives that compel out-of-the-box thinking. Therefore, some perspective shifts might sound crazy or feel like a zen koans. For example, one perspective is to flip it around, invert it, reverse it. Reversing an idea may sound crazy, but it usually leads to brilliant thinking. Another shift: How do we billionify this idea? Many ideas may seem like small ideas, but in reality they're seeds of billion-dollar ideas, if we only knew how to enlarge, deepen and modify them. A third perspective shift is to have the brainstormers in the group imagine they were Einstein or Steve Jobs, or their favorite creative hero, and ask what this channeled brilliance would add. Anything to get out of the rut of normal thinking.

One of my pet projects is to create 52 radically fresh and compelling perspectives, and turn it into a deck of innovation cards. That is, if I can ever find any free time for small artistic and creative pursuits. Anyway, if you'd like to play, send me your ideas for perspectives or prescriptions. Just email me from my profile page, send me your contribution, and I'll share the best of them here. And heck, you'll get a free deck of cards in return, and the best contribution wins a nifty T-shirt.

Are you ready for a throwdown?