Do you know how to create new products from your old knowledge?

Three steps to innovate the past

Most organizations sit on vast pools of historical and archival data, dismissing them as outdated or irrelevant. Age-old ideas, technologies, perspectives, and institutional memories are often left in the vaults to gather dust. Here’s how to leverage the past to shape the future:

1. Recover

First, leaders need to focus systematically on recovering, restoring, and digitizing historical materials such as books, recipes, and artifacts: transitioning them from external, exogenous resources to organized and accessible knowledge bases.

2. Revive

In the second phase, you need to introduce the reinterpreted knowledge to the organization and use it to steer new discussions around market and product offerings. This phase also requires overcoming deeply embedded cultural and value systems to sustain an innovative approach.

3. Renew

From individual to company to industry, the final phase is about introducing new products and services shaped by old knowledge to the market. This means reconfiguring product–market relations, and legitimizing and repositioning new products for fresh markets.

Checklist

Answer these questions to make sure you are maximizing your repository of “old” knowledge:

1. How do we access our physical archives?
2. How do we repurpose our digital knowledge?
3. Are we tackling embedded cultural and value systems within the organization?
4. Do we have a pathway to recombining established knowledge components?
5. How can we use reinterpreted knowledge to steer discussions around new market and product offerings?