Innovation is Not Problem Solving
The most effective innovators don’t wait for problems to arise. They fix what isn’t broken and seek to improve on things that have no apparent deficit.
Innovation Essentials: Unlearning
One of the central challenges innovators manage to overcome is the tendency to cling to past assumptions and beliefs and orthodoxies. Being willing and able to escape that mental inertia is one of the things that most distinguishes innovators. They’re skilled uinlearners.
Evaluating Innovative Ideas as Stories
There’s something remarkably powerful about a good story. It can take the driest of facts and breathe life into them, and it can do the same thing with an idea. Skilled innovators take their ideas and turn them into stories, often reshaping their assumptions and beliefs in the process.
It’s Time We Stopped Trying to Buy Creativity
Creative people tend to be intrinsically motivated. This is one of the best researched but least appreciated pieces of the whole innovation equation. It requires a total paradigm shift in the way companies think about motivating employees and what behaviors are valued.
Reinventing Wheels
What is it about attempts at creativity and discovery that so frequently prompt us to turn up our noses and sniff, “Well that’s not really new.” As if to say that if it’s not a world class breakthrough, it simply doesn’t qualify. We don’t do that with other skills and behaviors.
Does It Work?
It’s easy for anyone to look back on an idea that has either succeeded or failed and draw conclusions about whether or not it was a good idea to pursue. The harder question is of course, “How does one know before an idea has succeeded or failed whether or not it’s worth pursuing?”
Inevitable Innovation
What are you doing to make sure you catch the coming wave of innovation in your business? What are your competitors soon going to be doing that you’d better be doing too? Such trends can be extremely difficult to predict but when they hit you have to be ready for them.