Weekend innovation tip: Have a point of view about the future

How often do you either read or have an insightful conversation that makes you think and question your assumptions about the future? No often I’ll assume.

Why is this?

Because more people have a chance to express their ideas to the world but most of it is worthless blabber!

Don’t get me wrong, the fact millions of people can communicate their ideas through a blog, Twitter, Facebook and such is great for society. The problem is that there is a lot of repetition and old ideas get amplified.

The only thing different is the name of the person who said it and how the message was packaged.

Repeating the same stuff is easy because there’s no real thinking involved and blending in easier that standing out.

The fact is most people stand for nothing more than more of the same!

The quest of any innovator is to stand out from the crowd and the way to do that is to have your own point of view of the future. A unique of view of how things could be better or different (we definitely know the future is going to be different) is like a light in the fog, it points the way to a clear view.

Any individual who has a well developed point of view about an opportunity is like a beacon pointing to the sky that attracts people to his ideas.

To start building our point of view we can start by asking ourselves some questions about what might the future hold:

  • What is changing in the world?
  • What does it mean for others?
  • What does it mean for us?
  • What do we want to happen?
  • What opportunities do these changes make possible?
  • What do we have to do to play a role?
  • What new business concepts could exploit these changes?
  • What do we do next?

Innovation is what distinguishes between a leader and a follower. If you can’t create a sense of future, no one can follow you.

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