How can innovation help our personal lives?

In my last post, I defined innovation and asked "Got Innovation?"

In this post, I'd like to share some stories about applying innovation to our personal lives and a good read to learn more.

When I was a kid, I saw opportunity where others didn't.  My sister and I (7 and 5 years old respectively) raised money for Muscular Distrophy by creating a carnival and inviting the neighbor kids to play games for nickel and dime donations.  We were featured on the Breakman Bill Show on TV and won ski equipment for our whole family.  By seeing a health need to creating something new that kids could do, we made a difference.  

As a teenager, our high school school marching band was small and nerdy.  I convinced the Band Director to teach us how to play Soul Man, a chart topping song at the time, and wear sunglasses like Jim Belushi and Dan Akroyd in the popular movie, Blues Brothers.   By playing fun music in a cool way, we attracted 50 new kids the next year.  Marching band and the larger music program became cool and grew from 79 kids to 129 kids while I was drum major.  Over the years, the band program has grown to a third of the school (334 kids) and has become the thing to do.  Now....you're not cool if you are not in band!  

Finally, for 25+ years, I've had the privilege of creating value at the intersection of business and technology.  In 1996, a large aerospace company in the Seattle area did not fully understand the power of the internet, the web, and portals.  Small teams of like-minded individuals were creating pilot web sites with different looks and feel and underlying architecture.  I was one of them creating, with a small team, a Flight Ops Engineering self-service web site.  Though well intentioned, we were building "stove pipes in the sky" that mirrored the independent "brick and mortor" departments serving our airline customers.  A few of us saw the opportunity to create a "whole that was greater than the sum of the parts".  We created a "smoke and mirrors" day in the life demo for Executives showing how our airline customer's lives would improve by self-serving through an integrated customer care portal, with common look and feel, architecture, access control and backend processes.  Within days we received $5.6 million and hired 26 people to deliver the first of hundreds of applications.  The portal won industry awards and has saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars since it's creation.  Many of the teammates were promoted and have brought innovative thinking to solve other challenges.

I hope these brief stories inspire you to look differently at your personal and professional life; the opportunities to innovate are all around you.    When you do choose to look for ways to innovate and lean in to make your idea happen, you increase your chances of feeling empowered, of being more engaged in your work, and often will receive rewards and promotions faster than your peers.

If you are interested in learning more about the power of personal innovation, I recommend reading Disrupt Yourself by Whitney Johnson: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24693697-disrupt-yourself 

Highlights about the book:

Are you a high potential charting your course within your current organization, a leader trying to jumpstart innovative thinking in your company? Or are you ready to do something new?

Consider this simple yet powerful idea: disruptive companies and ideas upend markets by doing something truly different – they see a need, an empty space waiting to be filled, and they dare to create something for which a market may not yet exist. An expert in driving innovation via personal disruption, Whitney Johnson, will help you understand how the frameworks of disruptive innovation can apply to you: if you want to be successful in unexpected ways, follow your own disruptive path. Dare to innovate. Dream big dreams. Do something astonishing. Disrupt yourself. In this book, you will learn how to apply these frameworks to building a business, career – and you.

We are living in an era of accelerating disruption – those who can manage the S-curve waves of learning and maxing out will have a competitive advantage. But this is a skill set that needs to be learned. Disrupt Yourself will help people cope with the unpredictability of disruption, and use it to their competitive advantage.

Please share your own stories of innovation and how you are helping change the world one idea at a time!

Onward!
Dave