Innovation is Unglamorous, Messy and Time-consuming!

Look, I love innovation just like any other entrepreneur.??Innovation, just like a Hollywood starlet, can look sexy, glamourous and exciting.??But once the starlet removes her makeup, fake eyelashes, jewellery, and steps into regular clothes, she becomes the average girl next door.??In fact, she may even seem completely unattractive.

Innovation is not very different.??Once you remove the makeup, it’s rather mundane. Startup entrepreneurs and young corporate innovators might think innovation is fast, structured, scientific, predictive and easy to measure and move forward.??But the sad reality is that it’s slow and cumbersome, frustrating, creates massive emotional highs and lows, has a high chance of failure and is totally unpredictable!

Breakthroughs don’t come overnight, depending on the problem you’re trying to solve, it can take weeks, months or even years.??You need to have infinite patience and know that you’re in it for the long haul.

In his excellent book?Mapping Innovation, author and Unreasonable Thinking Summit speaker Greg Satell talks about the discovery of Penicillin.??The popular story is that, in 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered a bacteria killing fungus, which he named?Penicillium rubrum.??And the rest is history.

Satell shares the story in more detail; after publishing the results in a scientific journal, Fleming’s discovery went largely unnoticed for a?decade.??The story of Penicillin doesn’t continue until 1939, when a different scientific team discovered the paper and pursued the matter. The new team made big leaps in experimental treatments for bacterial infections.??However, they could not produce the treatment in commercial quantities.

The scientists moved to the US to continue their work with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and it wasn’t until after the Second World War, in 1945, that penicillin became available for the general public - almost two decades after Fleming’s initial discovery.

There are countless other stories like this. Satell argues that it usually takes 30 years for an innovation to reach the mainstream, with many failures along the way.

Of course, here we’re talking about major innovations.??As an entrepreneur, you shouldn’t plan for your next innovation to take 30 years, but know you need to be patient, consistent and somewhat stubborn to produce great innovations.??It’s very unglamorous.?