2 What Is Innovation and Why Do We Need It?
Innovation is about structured ingenuity not creativity. Innovation is an outcome that is something Meaningfully Unique (5). Without innovation, there is not anything new, and without anything new, there will be little to no progress. If an organization is not making progress, it simply cannot stay relevant in the accelerated competitive technology-based marketplace. This goes for people and their careers too.
There is more to innovation than firms looking to achieve competitive advantages, or someone wanting to invent something, create a new startup, or reboot their career. Innovation is the core reason for modern progress. However, innovation will always cause disruption. Therefore, with innovation, change is inevitable and requires significant management, methodical thinking, communications, and stewardship of resources to lead disruption toward a premeditated outcome.
Innovation Always Confronts the Fear of the Unknown (6)
The biggest impediment to innovation is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of risk, fear of being wrong. Professional innovators rarely charge into a problem or opportunity without first giving pause to investigate and contemplate… to incite their minds. Fear is addressed by exploring resources and methods to inspire our minds beyond what we already know to search for the unknown. The quantity of diversity of details, experiences, and observational insights combined with discovery from analyzing data help drive out fear by building a stable and reliable knowledge base.
The Challenge with Being Concise
All submissions for assignments and exercises in the Innovation Principles course are to be clear, concise and to the point. Sentences are to be written between 12 and 18 words. This forces students to focus on core issues and describe the subject and analysis with clarity.
A primary factor of all humans is… they want to be known (7). Therefore, there is always a compelling reason to tell a story, to share opinions, and digress. The problem is that decision makers rarely care about opinions. They are busy and when they make a ruling they rely on logical deductions and unbiased interpretations of facts reflective of succinct insight and judgement.
Long verbose sentences give the impression that the author suffers from rambling thoughts. Which reflects on the perception that the author is unable to give clear direction and manage resources. Misunderstandings often cause loss of time and resources while arousing disharmony. Lack of clarity and concise thought could imply the author is the risk… not the solution or opportunity.
In all the course skills’ exercises students learn the most crucial factor of getting innovations approved i.e.: communications. Whether a person is leading a team to follow through on an idea or motivate a gatekeeper to endorse a recommendation: it boils down to one statement. If decision makers are not inspired and do not clearly understand… then the reward isn’t given.
