What Is Innovation?
Tom Triumph
Business, Innovation, Technology & Product Development Leadership. Consultant, Speaker & Author
What is innovation?
Well, forget the notion that innovation is just about science or technology. Innovation is relevant to essentially every aspect of our lives. Specifically your life. Your work, play, education, how you socialize, your family life and even how you parent. In fact, innovative thinking has been at the core of every improvement throughout history.
So, what is innovation?
It's looking at something you've seen countless times before, and seeing something new. Something that for whatever reason, you never saw before. The proverbial answer hiding in plain sight, the missing puzzle piece waiting to be found - sometimes by pure imagination.
It's using a new perspective, which can be revealing.
It's combining different things to create something useful. And sometimes, one newly combined solution can result in a 10X improvement, or more.
It's a story, and repeatedly presented to shape our thinking. A story provides a narrative to help us comprehend our environment, share understanding, and creates culture.
They can be old stories passed along for generations, hard-wired into us as children. Or new stories.
"Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today." -Robert McKee
We have to be vigilant about accuracy. Because, the truth is much of what we "know" is wrong. We've bought-in, and you don't even know it.
Innovators develop a new awareness of the stories we're told, and tell their own.
Innovation is discerning order from chaos, finding patterns, which gives us the knowledge to formulate chemicals, cure diseases, control the dynamics of flight, and make sense of the seemingly random.
Author Clay Shirky says, "It's not information overload. It's filter failure."
How are we doing? We're living in the most abundant and safest time to be alive. Threats to our survival have dramatically decreased throughout history. But nobody is immune from problems or disasters, and the more accurately we seperate signal from noise, the better we can both prevent and prepare for them, and help others.
Innovation requires courage, which is not being boisterous or over confident. Darwin said "ignornace more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
Courage is taking responsibility and struggling to find a better way.
Courage is how Chuck Close, one of the greatest living portrait artists in the world, who could draw with such exactitude, that his 9 x 7 foot drawings look like photographs. And why after he had a debiliting stroke which left him wheelchair bound and paralyzed to the point where he could move his arm just a few inches, he strapped a brush to his hand and develped an entirely new way of painting small grid by small grid.
Innovation requires curiousity, and stops when complacency begins.
When the student stops learning.
When the teacher knows enough.
It stalls when the need to appear right (or congruent with the past) is greater
than the confidence required to make a correction.
Innovation is often disassembling and stripping away the facade of what currently exists, - and then reimagining something new, something better.
It's what architect Frank Gehry did when he looked back at hundreds of years of buildings - and all the right angle and flat planes, and their designs that were easily explained in two-dimensional drawings. And the result being that we live essentially in boxes.
Gehry stripped bare the thinking to reconsider what a building could be - certainly protection from the elements, structural integrity, utility for water, light, septic - and added unfettered inspiration from nature, sculpture and the folds in a blanket that have comforted every child.
And a final quandary, innovation can be easy or difficult.
In 1964 Paul McCartney woke up one morning with an entire melody in his head and thought "Hey, I don't know this tune, or do I?" He went to the piano in his room and figured out the chords. It was so familar to him that for weeks he went around to all his friends playing it for them, asking if they'd heard it before. After a few weeks of asking, he realized it was original.
The song "Yesterday" is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music, and was voted the No. 1 pop song of all time by Rolling Stone.
Conversely, innovation can be very difficult and frought with problems - even when it seems like a sure thing. Like when BiC offered disposable adult underwear. Maybe people unconsciously thought they'd get cut (BiC razors), or it'd leave a mark (BiC pens) or they'd get burned (BiC lighters) - but they didn't sell.
So, what is innovation? It's the defining characteristic that's been at the core of our existence - long before recorded history. It's what makes us human. And like the heart pulsating rhythmically inside your chest 3.4 billion times if you live to be 80 years old, we remain nearly unaware that it's at work - sustaining us.
And just like you can dramatically improve your cardiovascular capability - you can improve you creative and innovative ability.
These skills aren't only available to a select special group of people. They're available to everyone. The skills can all be taught.
What's at stake? The ability to drive innovation and leapfrog your competition. A culture of creativity that transforms your business.
Most importantly, a better you.
***
Tom loves building meaningful businesses and technology (with people who care). He's the author of "Evolve or Die: Lessons for World-Class Innovation & Creativity." Follow him on LinkedIn. Reach him at tomtriumph.com or on Twitter @thomastriumph
Other articles on LinkedIn
What It Feels Like to Punch Fear In The Face
Career Advice From The World's Most Famous Robots
How To Die Broke And Not Broken
Find What You Love and Let It Kill You