4 Key Innovation Activities That Can’t Miss

Idris Mootee said: Innovation occurs at the intersection of previously unconnected and unrelated planes of thought. Does your business regularly, or maybe just occasionally, try innovation exercises? Can you name a couple of the innovation activities you may have performed in these exercises?

If we boil it all down, innovation is about four key capabilities or activities:

Spotting opportunities and trends in the marketplace before others do

Understanding customer needs before they are aware of them

The historical background: Technology Disruption: Behind the Scenes of a On-coming Problem

Generating interesting ideas that set the company apart from its competition

Successfully commercializing and launching the new product or service

Yes, there is more to innovation than these four points, but you get the drift, don’t you?

Related post: Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking

Let me tell you a story about Alexander Fleming. Ever heard of Fleming?

When Alexander Fleming, a brilliant but sometimes haphazard scientist, returned to his lab after vacation holiday in 1928, he found his work ruined. Fungus contaminated a bacteria culture he had been growing and, as it grew, it killed all the colonies it touched.

Most people would have simply started over, but Fleming was very curious by what had happened. And his curiosity caused him to switch his focus from the bacteria to the fungus itself.

First, identified the mold and the bacteria-killing substance, which he called “penicillin,” then he tested it on other bacteria cultures. Seemingly in a single stroke, Fleming had created the new field of antibiotics.

Is that how you see innovation? That’s how most of us see innovation. A flash of brilliance and Eureka! A new world is born.  But not so fast.

The truth is far messier. In fact, it wasn’t until 1943—nearly two decades later—that penicillin came into widespread use and only then because it was accelerated by the effort helping World War II efforts.

But we need far better and faster results, don’t we? To achieve that, we need to discard old myths and deal with a process of change and innovation as it happens.

Truly breakthrough innovations are never a single event, nor are they achieved by one person, or even within a single organization. Rather, they happen when ideas combine to solve important problems.

Let examine another situation.

In her bestselling book Mindset, psychologist Carol Dweck argues that people who see their skills as a fixed set of strengths and weaknesses tend not to achieve much.

On the flip side, those that see their skills as dynamic and changeable can continually grow their abilities and soar to great heights.

In the growth mindset, people believe that their talents and abilities can be developed through passion, education, and persistence. For them, it’s not about looking smart or grooming their image. It’s about a commitment to learning–taking informed risks and learning from the results, surrounding yourself with people who will challenge you to grow, looking frankly at your deficiencies and seeking to remedy them. Most great business leaders have had this mindset because building and maintaining excellent organizations in the face of constant change requires it.”

-Carol Dweck

And surprisingly enough, businesses behave in the same way. Most see their business models as a permanent facet of their DNA, so when their environment changes, they fail to adapt.

And that, my friends, is why 87% of the companies on Fortune’s original list of 500 top firms are no longer there. You heard me right … 87%. Over time, most companies get better and better at things that people want less and less. Quite a paradox, isn’t it? WOW, an amazing fact!

Of course, that’s not 100% true. Firms like Procter & Gamble, General Electric, and IBM still thrive after a century or more. The reason they endure is that they don’t see their business as fixed, but have continually reinvented themselves and are vastly different enterprises than when they started. In an age of disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt. Even the best of the best, like these guys, teeter on the edge of disaster occasionally.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It has been said:

“If you don’t go, where you don’t go; you don’t know, what you don’t know.”

 In other words, look for innovation in the places you never look.

The more I have thought about that bit of insight, the more profound it has become for me.  We are all creatures of habit. So are larger organizations.  Doing things the way we’ve always done them is comfortable, familiar and easy.  It’s human nature to choose these “easy ways.”

Do you drive to work the same way every day?  Most likely. Do you read the same type of publications?  Again, most likely. How about TV and the Internet?  Watching the same group of shows or using the same set of websites is also a common habit.  When you do this, what do you feel?  You get a lot of familiar and comfortable feelings.

But true innovation often doesn’t make us comfortable.  It makes us uncomfortable.  And yet, it is in that discomfort that the new ways, the new ideas, and the new feelings come to light.

When you drive to work via a different route, you see different places and sights.  If you go to the newsstand and peruse the magazines that you never otherwise look at, you will see things you simply would never think about otherwise. You have done that occasionally, haven’t you?

The bottom line

Whether your firm uses “open innovation” to get the ideas from external parties, or practices business model innovation to transform not just products but your business model;  you still ultimately end up with the same basic innovation activities.

Please share an innovation or adaptation experience with this community.

Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options for innovation workshops to get noticeable results.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks

Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking

Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision

The Secrets to Building an Innovative Culture

 Mike Schoultz likes to write about the topics that lead to small business success. He also likes to share his many business experiences. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.