What is Innovation?

I get the question a lot, "what is innovation?" I push back against the notion that a "thing" is innovative and lean more towards people being innovative.

Innovation is the noun we give to the action verb, to innovate. I see four key pillars in how successful leaders innovate and make up our definition of "#innovation":

1?? Innovation requires technical structures that support rapid growth and change;

2?? Encoded behaviors that facilitate innovative thinking;

3?? Customer obsession which is central to builder success; and?

4?? Empowering small teams that drive experimentation.

In his contrarian article, How do we inspire innovation? The answer is anything but innovative… Lawrence Newport argues that "Innovation is the opposite of certainty. It upends institutions, irrevocably alters civilizations, and renders careers irrelevant at the drop of a hat. It does all of this while its promises are vague and unknown."

I am a little less pessimistic and see uncertainty as a thing that can be prepared for, if not sometimes controlled. Edwin Booz once said, "if it can be done, it can be measured." I've come to believe that speed matters in business, bureaucracy breaks innovation, and process is the enemy of creativity. Jeff Bezos is famous for saying, "Failure & invention are inseparable twins", if you're going to innovate, you must accept a degree of failure.

As much as I like listening to Dr. Newport’s YouTube channel, In Pursuit Of Progress, I don’t always agree with him. He continues his dissent by suggesting that innovations “promises are vague and unknown.” It is no surprise he says, “then that innovators and innovation are so often feared or mocked. Feared for the results of their creations, mocked for dreaming of ‘not yet possible’ things, or changes to ancient precedents.”

I don't see a separation between data driven decision-making and experimentation. Data is deductive and experimentation is abstract. Done correctly, these are two-way doors. Decisions that can be reversed if they are not working as expected.

In this YouTube video about Amazon's Culture of Innovation, I further unpack the four pillars of innovation and provide valuable insights into how organizations can build their own culture of innovation.