This is when you know you have innovated ..
Innovation is not the process of coming up with widgets or technologies. It’s about believing in and capitalising on the talent, imagination and brilliance that resides in your culture, your colleagues and your teams.
Innovation is about the willingness to be surprised, the openness and ability to listen and the curiosity to explore even the smallest things. Daring to venture into what we don’t know we don’t know, going beyond what customers and colleagues are asking for because you can see something nobody else can, yet.
Innovation is not only about having ideas it’s about drawing them out, making them tangible, creating a shared understanding motivating the organisation. Visualizing and concretizing the idea into something that people want to join, your movement grows.
Innovation is about saying ‘yes’. It’s about having the energy to be patient. To believe in your colleagues that they are seeing something you are not and that whatever it is might or might not be brilliant, but you have to keep the flame lit to find out.
Innovation is about stamina, it’s about perseverance, about building and improving and learning through the disappointments and the successes. It’s about making a mistake, correcting or even changing everything to make sure that you keep driving towards your promise.
Innovation is about killing ideas. Things that don’t work. No matter how hard you tried. Sometimes it’s just not there. You might be too early, in the wrong place or with the wrong customers. Sometimes are just not the right times for every idea.
Innovation is about continuing to learn after launch. It is when it comes into the hands of people in real situations with real needs that it is going to be adopted, changed and it’s going to need an organization behind it fit to learn and make improvements.
Eventually the innovation becomes ubiquitous, something we don’t see, but it’s still there producing value. It has now become a thing we expect. You have successfully produced a new value and new need empowering and enabling people.
This is when you know you have innovated.
The text is a synopsis written for an inspirational talk on innovation
