INNOVATION: TRANSFORMING THE WORLD FOR GOOD(Part 3)

Whether we are technically aligned or hesitantly inclined, the truth remains that major changes are happening in our environment, in the makeup of our culture, in the style of working of governments and corporate companies and then in our day to day life style that everyone of us are experiencing. Tom Freston beautifully stated that:

Innovation is taking two things that exist and putting them together in a new way.

Actually innovative products have ideality when the solution to a problem only appears when it's needed. We have already talked about the power of communication in the below newsletters and before long we'll talk about negotiation.

Serendipity as a method of innovation has a poor track record. Although serendipity products are more memorable than others. According to Saleema Vellani, Innovation starts within us - by knowing ourselves - and it happens with the "we." When we have a strong level of self-awareness, we can empathize with others, embrace resilience, and leverage our stories to make our mark on the world.

Indeed I completely agree with her. Self awareness is a significant part of innovation journey. Although we actually live in an age that promotes self awareness but fails to show us how to use our self awareness to arrive at good decisions. We learn more and more things about ourselves without learning ways to sort them out or to sort out the feelings they generate in us. Mr Amin Toufani shares an interesting tool for improving and effectively using our self-awareness. He calls it Lygometry - a methodology which is a collection of things we know we don't know.

Indeed interesting, isn't it? I am amazed by the way he explains this concept explicitly. My favorite line in his talk is, "The easiest way to think out of the box is to not know where the box is".

We often suffer with functional fixedness i.e.,we suffer from cognitive biases which limits us to see an object only in the way it is traditionally seen or used. But such biases can be challenged by systematic inventive thinking tools for innovative development. Stay tuned till next time as I will be sharing about them in detail.