Understanding the Innovation Engine: The Day-to-Day of Business Growth

For many people, the term “innovation” brings to mind cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, ambitious “unicorns” that generate absurdly high profits, and once-in-a-generation solutions that change how we live. Yet while these are all important, the day-to-day of innovation is far more mundane: not a sudden bolt of inspiration, but a regular process that generates results little by little. Part of the reason that people have this view is that they see disruption and innovation as the same thing, which isn’t always the case.?

As I’ve written before, disruption is the process of shaking up a market, industry, or status quo, while innovation is the act of introducing new ideas, processes, or products. Innovation eventually leads to disruption, but it isn’t necessarily a disruptive force in of itself. This is an important distinction, as people often think innovation is this disruptive event that upends everything when in practice it is a process that leads to ideas that will one day be disruptive. For that reason, many have described innovation as the engine of progress, driving businesses and societies forward.

Research shows that business leaders increasingly recognize the importance of innovation for the long-term success of their businesses. But to keep that Innovation Engine running, it is important to understand how it works. From my perspective, the Innovation Engine can be broken down into three steps: ideation, prototyping, and learning.?

Step 1: Ideation?

Conventional wisdom tells us that quality is more important than quantity. The ideation process is one of the few times where the exception is true. In the early stages of the ideation process, you shouldn’t worry too much about quality, instead coming up with as many ideas as possible. Too often we get hung up when coming up with new ideas because we don’t want to suggest something that’s too silly, or too outrageous, or we worry that whatever we come up with will fall flat. Yet sometimes silly ideas can grow into brilliant ideas with some time and consideration. So come up with a large list of ideas, no judgments or qualifications, then you can start to prioritize them based on what shows the most potential.?

Step 2: Prototyping

Once you've come up with some workable ideas, it is time to start prototyping. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a big dollar investment mind you. Even something as simple and cliche as something sketched out on a cocktail napkin can work. It’s simply a matter of figuring out how to take the ideas you came up with in Step 1 and determine their practicality, effectiveness, and potential appeal. If Step 1 was about generating potential solutions to your customers’ problems, then Step 2 is about determining how well they work.?

Step 3: Learning

Last but not least, you should assess the results of Step 2, moving forward with what works and ditching what doesn’t. Most importantly though, you should also come away more knowledgeable than you were before. Not every idea is going to work, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. American culture often treats failure as a bad thing that reflects poorly on someone, but most often that’s only the case if one doesn’t learn anything from the process. So whatever the end result of the first two steps, the goal of Step 3 should be to learn what doesn’t work while applying, amplifying, and scaling what does work.?

Businesses must continually innovate in order to grow and scale. Without a steady influx of new ideas, even the most successful business can wind up being left behind by the competition. Coming up with new ideas is essential to long-term success, so business leaders must understand how the innovation process works. By embracing the simple three-step process of ideation, prototyping, and learning, companies can maintain their innovation, generating new ideas and seeing continuous growth in the process.