Cross-Industry Innovation
Cross-industry innovation means solving a problem by studying how an unrelated industry solved the same underlying mechanism, then adapting that mechanism, not its surface features, to your own context.
Five steps run left to right, from naming the precise problem through to scaling only what actually transfers.
Reach for this when…
- Your industry's usual playbook has run out of ideas for a specific problem.
- You need a genuinely different angle, not another internal brainstorm.
- A competitor just copied your last advantage and you need the next one from somewhere they won't look.
How to run it
- Name the specific problem precisely before searching outside.
- Pick two or three unrelated industries to study deliberately.
- Find the analogous underlying problem, not the surface trick.
- Adapt the mechanism to your context and test it small.
- Scale what actually transfers, drop what doesn't.
A worked example
Situation. Camila Restrepo led product at Banco Comunitario Antioqueno, a small lender in Medellin, Colombia, where loan-desk queue times were driving complaints and nobody in banking had solved it.
Applied. She looked outside banking at how airlines manage boarding queues, isolated the actual mechanism, priority ordering by readiness, and adapted it: customers with complete documents got a fast lane, not a shorter wait for everyone.
Result. Average wait time fell and queue complaints dropped, without adding a single teller.
The catch
The common failure is copying the surface, an app feature or a slogan, instead of the underlying mechanism, and industries differ enough in regulation and economics that a direct copy often just breaks. It also needs someone senior enough to back an idea that visibly isn't 'how we do it here'.
If you can't say which mechanism you're borrowing, you borrowed the aesthetic, not the innovation.