Weekend innovation tip: WTF is innovation to you?

Innovation is about change and progress not great ideas.

I get two responses to that question: dull faces or some lunchbox definition.

Businesses like the sound of the word of ‘innovation’ appearing in their vocabulary yet rarely can everyone in the organization come to a collective definition of what is means to them and this is a BIG problem. They’re chickens running around without a head because they don’t know where they’re headed and this is because they’re adopting someone else’s definition for themselves and fail to see that it doesn’t fit them.

There are many definitions to innovation but I will take a different approach and start with questions to help you construct your own definition of innovation instead. These questions will absolutely stretch your thinking around what’s important to you, your customers and the world which, and this my friends is what innovation is all about: change and progress.

• What will we do differently of better than our competitors to achieve greater value for our customers and superior profits for our firm?

• What’s missing in the world of our customers that we could create to make their life a lot more fun and easier?

• What do we want to create?

Let me put it to you this way: if you’re not changing something then you are NOT doing innovation.

Does your definition of innovation answers these questions?

Related Posts

1. Weekend innovation tip: Go lateral
2. Weekend innovation tip: Be a kid again
3. Weekend innovation tip: Have a point of view about the future
4. Weekend innovation tip: Create new products and services using subtractive thinking
5. Weekend innovation tip: what made you great in the past will not make you great in the future