Innovation is of All Ages. Do You Agree?

A big misunderstanding among top managers is assuming that establishing a culture of innovation requires bringing in young people into their organisations. I tell them they are wrong.?As innovation has nothing to do with age in my experience.?Do you agree?

I travel all over the world working with innovators on all continents. And I observe in practice that innovation is of all ages. And I am not the only one. I was delighted to read this statement of John Levis, global chief Innovation officer of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, in the?Wall Street Journal which really supports my view.

Lewis states:?"We get out-of-the box ideas from all generations. What was important was convincing others that it’s OK to risk failure, that trying out new ideas that fail is even a positive. As I said earlier, for an organisation to have a culture of innovation, the talent and performance model should not only tolerate experimentation and failure, but also reward those who advance innovative thinking, regardless of the outcome".

A 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have significantly more innovation potential than a 25-year-old.

The view that innovation has nothing to do with age is also supported by?research ?of Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University. He states that a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have significantly more innovation potential than a 25-year-old. He based his conclusions on data on Nobel Prize winners and great inventors.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I am now 62 and have been working for around 35 years now. When I reflect on my personal skills of being creative and making innovation happen, I think I even became a better innovator when growing older, for five reasons:

1. I had to learn the patterns before breaking them.?As junior manager in the food industry I was very eager to learn at the companies I worked for. I learned what made them successful in the past. And to be effective, I adapted myself to "how things are done around here".
2. I dare more.?I notice that I dare more now that when I was young, as I do not care so much anymore about what others would think of me and dare to follow my gut feel. Only as I got older I dared to challenge and break present patterns and follow my gut feel.
3. I learn from my failures.?my ideas were not always successful of course. I learned continuously from my mistakes though. This created a far better business compass of what will work and what will not. Of course I am still wrong, but less than I used to be :-).
4. I am still high creative. My creativity has not diminished at all, compared to 30 years ago. I still get the craziest insights at unexpected moments like wakening up, driving a car or walking the woods on Crete.
5. Greyish hair gives me authority.?In organizations you can invent alone but you can't innovate alone. You need a lot of others in an organization to get from an idea to the market. Getting older and growing greyish hair helped me in growing the FORTH?innovation methodology , as one of the leading front-end-of-innovation best practices over the years.

What about you? Are you getting more innovative too? Please share your experiences as a comment below.

Innovation is of all ages. It needs the creativity of a 5-year-old, the passion of a 30-year-old and the wisdom of a 70-year -old.

For me innovation is of all ages. It needs the creativity of a 5-year-old, the passion of a 30-year-old and the wisdom of a 70-year -old. I wish you lots of success on your innovation journeys.

Let's innovate!

Ps. When you want to master an effective online innovation method to become a successful innovator, you might check out?this next?100% online training April 2022 ?in the FORTH innovation method.