Innovative companies take a methodical yet varied set of approaches to ideation, which can be categorized in the following five ways:

• Forward thinking
forecast the future, anticipate opportunities, and leverage tomorrow’s trends.
• Incremental thinking
keep complacency at bay with ongoing improvements to even your most successful solutions.
• Customer-centric thinking
pay close attention to what your customers say to generate ideas and keep ahead of the competition.
• Disruptive thinking
identifying your industry’s paradigms and conventions—and shattering them.
• Collaborative thinking
achieve innovation through external partnerships and open collaborations.

Discover 15 tactics to  create better ideas at Strategy+Business.