I’ve been a fan of Seth Godin for a couple of years, ever since I realised that if I was going to run my own business there was a whole bunch of skills I needed to pick up that spending my teenage years in front of a compiler didn’t prepare me for. Like, for example, marketing.

Seth is by no means unheard of, his name is now quite famous within marketing circles and he is definitely one of the few marketing geeks who the blogging crowd think “gets” what the Web is about. As a result, his books get widely read, widely commented on, and if you interested in the web as a marketing tool - and I’m talking blogs and user engagement here, not spamming - you should get familiar with his work.

Free Prize Inside is not a new book. It’s been published and in circulation since May 2004. So why am I reviewing it now? Well, because I only got around to reading it last weekend. :-)

As with nearly all business books, the amount of original thinking you’ll find in FPI depends on how widely read you are, how imaginative you are yourself, and how exposed you are to methods of innovative thinking as part of your daily work life. I can’t imagine many businesses embody innovation to the extent that I, or Seth Godin, would suggest it should be, but if you work for an ad agency you might find some of the content of this volume a little ‘beginner level’.

The core of Seth’s thesis is that soft innovation is an easier sell for everybody - your colleagues as much as your customers - compared to ‘hard’ innovation/blue-sky thinking. I’ve covered before how I think about innovation - push edges and boundaries, it’s quicker and easier and more productive - but what was startling when reading Free Prize Inside was that he had managed to put the time and effort into synthesising it into a series of basic tools.

The value for me in this book is this simple reduction to basic steps things I’ve always known - i.e. I now have a vocabulary I can share that explains what I’m talking about.

For example, the ‘fulcrum of innovation’ is basically a fancy way of asking yourself three questions before you take an innovation to colleagues, in order to determine how likely it is they’re going to support you:

• Is it going to work?
• Is it worth doing?
• Are you the one to get it done?

These are of course the questions running through people’s heads when you take them through any new idea you want to put in place, and by thinking through how to get a ‘yes’ to every one of those questions, you’re going to be in a better position to pitch your idea. You might be wrong, but at least you’ll have gone through a methodology before you start trying to pitch your idea. A simple technique, but worth learning.

In fact, pitching your idea is such an important aspect of innovation, Seth actually suggests you work out how to sell your idea before you actually come up with it. Selling your idea, he claims, is as important a step in making it happen as coming up with the idea itself. If you come up with an idea that isn’t going to work, isn’t worth doing, or nobody thinks you can do, there’s no point in trying to develop it past the scribble you just made on your whiteboard or notebook.

This is sensible advice, but I’m concerned this is going to stifle those people for whom self-doubt is the modus operandi of thought. Convinced that they can’t have an idea colleagues will think they can execute, they will refuse to actually try and create an idea at all.

That said, Seth’s methods of ‘edgecrafting’ (or as I called it in the past “evolutionary innovation”) lowers the barrier of resistance by allowing people to easily see how to improve a product so as to create an excitement in the customer. Seth specifically looks to try and give every customer a “free prize” or a bonus that they weren’t expecting. In actual fact, this isn’t about shoving a free plastic toy inside the box (well, not always), but rather is about finding the edge/boundary that you can push a product to. Doing more, doing less, treating people the same, treating people equally, whatever it is, find an edge and push your product there in a way your sector isn’t used to.

He also suggests brainstorming is the wrong way to innovate, but for different reasons I think it’s useless. He claims that within a group it’s too hard to get people to speak up and contribute ideas for fear of ridicule or that they’ll be asked to actually do some work. Instead, he claims, if you ask people to work individually on a problem the results will be better. I think the flaw with brainstorming is that you end up asking people to do the impossible: start with a blank piece of paper and re-invent from scratch. If instead you were to give people a set of constraints and asked them to push them around, it’s still perfectly possible in my opinion to come up with quality ideas as a team.

In general the book is filled with clever techniques, but I’m not sure whether it’s because I’ve read so much of Godin’s other work - and work by others - in recent years that it doesn’t feel particularly remarkable or original any more. That said, if you are struggling with innovation and how to make it happen within your own workplace, it’s an affordable shot in the arm that should get the creative juices flowing.