You’re innovating. Now what?

Innovation.

?n??ve??(?)n/

noun

1. the action or process of innovating.
2. a new method, idea, product, etc.

Nice enough definitions, and a wide spread term. But what actually IS innovation? What does it look like? What do we do with innovations when we find them? And importantly, why do we care?

At the core of it, ‘innovation’ can be the term to describe something that makes a thing better/more efficient/higher impact. It’s change that creates value, not just for the sake of being new. An important distinction. Care about it yet?

Step one. Look at the stuff happening in your school, organisation or your own practice that you reckon is a bit of a game changer. You can get a sense of this by asking if someone else might look at it and say ‘wow, that’s pretty cool!’ or even if it’s made your work easier, more efficient, higher impact.

Step two. Categorise it. There are three basic ‘buckets’ of innovation. Disruptive, Radical & Routine. Let’s work backwards.

Routine Innovations are the ones that are simple tweaks to the exisiting and make things a bit better. Things like using Slack and Trello to increase productivity across your team and cut out excess emails. These are nice tweaks that every person can get addicted to making. Everyday Innovations.

Radical Innovations are the ones that make others sit up and want to copy it right away. Most innovations hang out in this bucket. Familiar enough to be understood, crazy enough that only the brave action them. And they change the game. Pi-Top is a pretty neat example. High-quality, cost-effective hardware and software tools constructed by students for use by students. These are the interesting things, and you can find more on ECideas and HundrED.

Disruptive Innovations are the those rare gems that break things, including that old status quo. This bucket is the holy grail of innovation. The iPhone is one example, Elon Musk has a fair few ideas in this bucket too, and in the education setting, we’re looking at ideas like THINK Global School, a travelling high school where students and teachers live and learn in four countries a year. These innovations make you a little uncomfortable. Sceptical even. They are big, bold and gutsy.

Now look at the idea (your idea or the idea of others) and sit it against the way things are done, otherwise known as the status quo. Now chuck the idea in one of the buckets.

Step Four. Share it. If you’re working on something that will make people’s lives better, share it. What’s why you should care about innovation. It changes lives (hopefully for the better). A doctor would share a finding if it was a matter of health and life, so do the same with your innovation. There are so many ways to do this from a Tweet to a keynote, or by submitting your innovation to HundrED. Good ideas don’t thrive in the dark!

Step Five. Keep pushing the boat out. Change is a process, not an event. Innovation is a mindset not a project. Don’t be selfish with your ideas or the cool stuff you’re working on. Look for problems and set out solving them. The world needs your clevers.