BPM Innovation – Are we missing a trick

I was sitting in one of my local restaurants.
On the table you had the regular items: a salt and pepper shaker, two small bottles of olive oil and lemon juice, and sugar for the coffee.
I was observing two female students giggling in the corner table. They had ordered a small lunch, and asked the waiter for a jug of water.
When the water arrived, they poured in the lemon juice, added the sugar, stirred.. and voila: lemonade.

“Cheeky” I said as I smiled to myself. I looked down at my drink, and asked myself “why didn’t you think of that?”

Today, I walked into Starbucks to get myself a coffee. Waited in line, paid, waited for them to make it, and then took the coffee to the small condiment bar where they have the sugar, sweeteners, milk, skimmed milk, additional plastic cups, and the chocolate and vanilla sprinkles .

A old man walked up next to me, smiled, said “good morning”, then took a plastic cup, poured in milk, sprinkled it heavily with chocolate, stirred, and voila: Chocolate Milk.

I had to smile. All the ingredients were in front of me, and I would never have thought of it in a million years. Simple innovation.
(Forget the money, forget the time I spent in the queue, he probably made a better drink than I had.)

On the way back home I started thinking:
BPM is a methodology that we blindly follow. We are programmed to think and work in a certain way. Nothing wrong with that. But are we missing an opportunity. Are we looking at all the ingredients in BPM and missing that simple innovative idea.