A Valuable Reminder Of What Innovation Is About

Read any business-news website or magazine and you’ll see stories linking innovation to technological advances. But an article in the most recent edition of Innovation Quarterly, a Boeing publication about our technical community, drove home what I believe is an essential yet often overlooked point about innovation.

The article is a Q&A with Pete Kunz, the chief technologist of our HorizonX team. In this interview, Pete offers his thoughts on the role that culture plays as a catalyst of innovation.

“As much as we lean on technology, I see innovation as a byproduct of culture,” Pete says. “Innovation comes from how we think about a problem, dissect it, and attack it in ways we have not thought of before.”

Pete’s view makes a lot of sense to me because it frames innovation broadly around solving problems. To me, innovation relates to a culture of solving problems and creating new opportunities, rather than a quest to develop technologies or products. That culture is enhanced by a work environment that fosters appreciation for diverse perspectives. As I said in a 2017 commencement address at Washington University in St. Louis, teams whose members are encouraged to raise diverse views increase the likelihood that they’ll uncover new information that will lead them to converge on the right answer.

By solving problems and capitalizing on opportunities, you provide the people who will use the results of your work – whether they’re end-user consumers or colleagues at your company – with value, or tangible benefits. That value can come in many forms: new or better products, faster cycle time, reduced cost, or revolutionary business ideas, to name a few examples. What matters is that the parties that will use your work demand this value from you.

To me, that ability to provide more value is the goal of innovation. It’s an entrepreneurial spirit that connects a customer need to the pursuit of creating something new and improved. As a result, innovation isn’t a task that’s owned by a startup company, the technology development organization, a new product department or a spinoff team. It’s about all of us giving customers more of what matters to them, whether it happens through delivering an incremental gain or disrupting an existing market.

That’s why innovation is everyone’s opportunity. We can all come up with ways to deliver more value by improving our products and results we provide at work, as well as the processes and tools we use to create them.

So if you actively seek ways to improve your work, congratulations! You’re an innovator!