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Innovation: The word that changes the world, every day
June 10th, 2008
Innovation, by definition, means doing new things. Innovations are ideas-based, situation-based, sometimes inspiration-based.
Innovation also means doing things better, improvement.
Top level US corporate leaders, the kind who can’t be ignored, are now pushing for innovation to become part of business culture. The need is for a new culture, where people’s ideas can be made productive, and where problems can be solved using innovation as the fundamental concept of solving them.
What that means in the job market is that the ideas people are finally getting some recognition where it matters. That hasn’t always been the case.
The business and industrial management sector has been getting a lot of flak, even from within its own ranks, about lack of innovation. Problems aren’t being solved, old ways of doing things are breaking down, through overloading.
That’s costing a fortune for consumers, producers, and service providers, meaning everybody.
The obsolete, insular, stuck in the mud, mentality of the business culture is also seen as being responsible for the devaluation of people who are diminished by lack of use of their knowledge, experience, and ideas.
Conventional business doesn’t really have any established structures for handling ideas. Sometimes they get used, often they don’t.
People and ideas are wasted. It can take years for a new idea to get into the workplace, and those years cost money and jobs.
Younger people may wonder why new ideas seem to move so slowly through the business and corporate world.
It’s mainly because nobody in the corporate was trained to understand innovation, and to recognize the process of innovation, and know how to make it work. People might be taught sales, but not how to handle ideas.
In fact, quite the opposite happened, and still happens. The culture had, and still has, a very strange approach to ideas. Innovation, or even the need for innovation, was sometimes seen as criticism of management. Innovation was actually obstructed, in defence against change and better methods, purely because someone was making a career out of the old methods.
Now, innovation is being demanded, by corporate leaders and advanced management science. It’s been recognized that you don’t (and can’t) solve problems and improve performance by just doing the same old things.
It’s also been recognized that blocking innovation is suffocating initiative, preventing progress and product development. In other words, it’s practically the exact antithesis of how America developed.
US economic history in the last 150 years is a testimony to innovation. America was built on new products, new methods of production, and above all, new ideas. Just about all the fundamental technology on Earth, at some point, was turned into viable commercial production by US industry.
The current fossilization of thinking is a real anomaly, and a very counterproductive thing.
Economically, it’s been a disaster for those who don’t innovate. All parts of any economy, national or global, are related. If one part of the economy is still in the Stone Age, it’s going to be a drag on the rest of the economy.
It’s also going against the movement of the global economy.
Commercially, being out of date with products and methods is now a very effective form of suicide.
The old methods are the current dinosaurs.
They’re something that should be extinct, for everybody’s sake. Things like paper trails, mindless obsession with minutiae, useless bureaucracy, cost structuring based on margins not production costs, they’re all fossils.
That’s what’s creating this demand. It’s not a request for change, it is an actual demand, coming from major achievers in US business.
What’s wanted is an understanding of the process of innovation. The idea is that management actively encourages innovation and provides the motive force and authority to make innovation work.
It also means that innovation becomes part of the workplace for competent and creative people. That’s a huge benefit, and it will provide massive inputs of innovation around the world.
Productivity is based on ideas. Have a look at the new products and ideas which have been brought to life by innovation in the last 20 years or so and made part of daily human reality:
Computers
The internet
The global economy
Cell phones
iPods
Broadband and related communications media
Video streaming
LCD and HD technologies
Genetic science
You’d need a phone book to list them all, and these have changed the whole world entirely in one generation.
They weren’t created by a static mentality.
Nor were the wheel, fire, cookery, and pizza deliveries.
The demand for innovation as part of business is perhaps the best thing that could happen to the human race, as it tries to emerge from poverty and the anonymity of mass culture, particularly in the workplace.
Innovation is where people get valued for their own competencies and their own personal inputs and efforts. The limitations of the conventional approach, where ideas are filtered through a range of blocked managerial drains before they can get anywhere, have to go.
Innovation creates more innovation. New ideas are born every second.
The ideas themselves are valuable in their own right. Every bit of intellectual property, every patent, trade mark, or piece of copyright, has value.
If you’re an ideas person, and you want a great career, where you can think yourself into some real achievements, this new culture is exactly what you need. Doesn’t matter if you’re 5 or 95, this is where you can be yourself, prove the value of your ideas, and achieve things on your own terms.
Some of the biggest businesses on Earth were created by innovation:
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, YouTube and countless others were based more on innovation than money.
So if America’s corporate leaders are now demanding innovation as part of the business culture, they don’t need to prove their point.
It’s right there for everyone to see.
One Response to “Innovation: The word that changes the world, every day”
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June 10th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
This blog describes innovation and its benefits in great detail, but it fails to mention what is driving this new focus on business innovation: Web 2.0. Through new internet technology customers are no longer simple bystanders. They aren’t willing to be force-fed what ever products companies decide to sell them. They want real input and they want their preferences responded to. Through wikis, blogs, and other new forms of web 2.0 communication they ensure that their opinions are heard. If companies don’t respond and innovate to satisfy this new type of customer they will be ostracized by the web 2.0 community. Why does this matter? If one customer is left unsatisfied, the whole world will know about it.
The new focus on innovation in the business world isn’t a result of desire to improve business. It is a necessity for staying afloat.