Some food for thought on innovation

A quick note at end of week, reflecting on a great keynote I attended at International Association of Exhibitions and Events (IAEE) 's annual convention in Dallas.

The keynote was delivered by Trendhunter's (I am already a fan) chief growth officer, Jonathan Brown (no relation). He does a great job of taking you through the history and evolution of hip hop music to point out how it came about through innovation and innovators.

A couple of points stood out for me:

• Innovation requires a commitment and constant feeding. The quote offered was from Vince Lombardi, "we will never achieve perfection, but in the pursuit we will achieve greatness."
• The concept of "sampling" in music applies. It is about borrowing from the existing to create the new. And, by the way, borrowing is okay - in fact, it is necessary. We learn and develop based on what we see, hear, know and experience. And this is beyond the concept of best practice.
• Innovation sometimes requires a willingness to destroy. The best new ideas disrupt the status quo, or outright replace it. This is somewhat obvious, but it is not all that easy to approach work with this mindset. Few of us have the intestinal fortitude to destroy things that have worked in the past. And conditions must be right, as there is great risk where there is also great reward.

On this last point, so much of this is about the risk-reward tradeoff and every scenario brings a different balance of these. It is easy to embrace the concept that you must think in terms of disrupting your own business or others will do it for you; but it takes courage - and the ability to gain buy-in up, down and sideways -- to accept the risks inherent in taking hard left or right turns or fully flipping the business on its head.