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Get Joyful Moments at Work or Private Life with These Creative Steps

I explain the value of combinatorial innovation and provide practical tips to create and leverage this unique and growing practice.

The brain loves novelty and new connections. Therefore, thinking and acting creatively rewards us with good feel biochemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.

I write a lot about innovation as it matters for personal and professional growth. I previously introduced combinatorial innovation as I have been using it for decades.

Some new subscribers who discovered the old story and heard a lot about the concept recently requested how to use it personally and professionally, asking me to give them practical steps and tips.

I also wrote about the success of a polymath entrepreneur, Hector, who built a unicorn business in three years using combinatorial innovation. He transformed his startup into a billion-dollar company using his beyond-box thinking.

Rather than creating new technology and products, Hector focused on and paid attention to the functions of his innovations and proven ideas in the industry intuitively. He then extended the meanings of multiple functions by combining them innovatively.

In this article, I will explain the mechanism and benefits and introduce practical steps for creating combinatorial innovation with examples at work and in your personal life without going into technical details.

What is combinatorial innovation?

Combinatorial innovation is the concept and the practice of combining different concepts, ideas, approaches, technologies, tools, products, or services to create novel, creative, productive, and innovative solutions.

You don’t have to be an inventor to achieve these goals. The process involves bringing diverse perspectives, knowledge, skills, and experiences together to produce unique outcomes by solving problems and creating new values for personal and professional purposes.

This unique approach to innovation has become popular in recent years as people or organizations seek new ways to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace.

There is remarkable progress in including combinatorial innovation in the digital transformation strategy. Industry trends are optimistic about the growth of combinatorial innovation in the digital space.

For example, Gartner informs that combinatorial digital innovation will become vital to make the most of digital technologies and processes in the next decade.

The critical success factors for combinatorial innovation are cultural diversity, synergistic fusion, technical excellence, and innovative collaboration.

Before providing the practical steps, I’d like to introduce the benefits and briefly discuss why we must leverage combinatorial innovation at work and personal life.

Compelling Benefits of Combinatorial Innovation

Creating combinatorial innovation can increase creativity, originality, novelty, efficiency, cost savings, risk reduction, higher success rates, market relevance, competitive advantage, and enhanced collaboration for better teamwork.

Combinatorial innovation can stimulate creativity and novelty, as team members are encouraged to think outside the box and explore new possibilities. Combining different elements allows us to create unique solutions that differentiate us from our competitors.

Combinatorial innovation can lead to increased efficiency and cost savings. For example, leveraging existing ideas, technologies, processes, tools, and products can reduce the time and resources required to create new solutions.

This unique approach can help people and organizations avoid costly and time-consuming research and development efforts.

By reusing and repurposing existing components, we can quickly and affordably create new products or services, deliver them timely, improve our productivity, and increase our income.

Combinatorial innovation can lower risks and increase success rates. By leveraging existing ideas, technologies, processes, tools, and products, we can reduce the risk of failure associated with desired innovations and increase the likelihood of succeeding projects.

As combinatorial innovation is based on agile approaches, we can rapidly test ideas in iteration, fail quickly, reduce the cost of failure, and increase the quality.

This unique approach also allows us to create novel solutions that meet the evolving needs of our clients. In addition, large organizations can act swiftly and stay ahead of the curve, remaining competitive in a crowded and demanding marketplace.

Combinatorial innovation requires collaboration and teamwork, as we must work together to identify and combine different elements. A diverse and inclusive work culture can increase meaningful engagement and employee satisfaction.

How to Use Combinatorial Innovation for Personal Life

Using combinatorial innovation can be applied to many areas of our daily lives. Combining different elements allows us to create unique and innovative solutions that meet our needs, desires, and preferences.

We can use the approach for cooking, fitness, learning, fashion, gardening, music, design, photography, and travel. I want to give a few examples so that you can get ideas for your hobbies.

A friend who is a talented chef combines different recipes to create unique meals for his family daily. They never have dull moments and don’t desire to eat out.

I like combining different types of exercises like calisthenics, trampolining, swimming, biking, dancing, and barefoot walking at weekends and during holidays to improve my fitness.

Using combinatorial innovation, I created a mental gym to train my brain and improve my cognitive health and performance.

A retired carpenter friend mixes and matches different furniture pieces, colors, and textures to create a unique living space for our neighbors and us. He became an interior designer after 70.

My friend’s 12-year-old daughter creates songs from various genres for her playlist that fits her mood and inspires her to study better.

A family member who is a polymath learns ideas, concepts, and facts from different disciplines and always wins the competitions in the trivia nights with her vast knowledge.

Her cross-discipline knowledge makes her a successful businesswoman with remarkable communication skills allowing her to discuss various topics with others. She is nicknamed a walking encyclopedia in her circles.

A friend practicing as a holistic health doctor uses combinatorial innovation by linking traditional and mainstream medical approaches and treatment methods to heal his patients.

A scientist friend collects anecdotes from different people on a specific problem and uses those perspectives by filtering and refining them with various scientific methods.

A lovely neighbor combines different plants to create a unique garden. Her garden has plants with different heights, colors, textures, and smells. She manages to communicate with plants making therapeutic effects on her health.

Some travelers mix and match different travel destinations, transportation, and cultural activities to create memorable travel experiences.

How to Use Combinatorial Innovation for Work or Business

We can create cross-functional collaboration, such as bringing team members from different departments or areas of expertise together to work on a project. This can lead to novel and innovative ideas.

Some designers combine two unrelated products or services to create something new. They also take an existing product or service and modify it to make it better.

We can create cross-industry innovation by looking to other industries for inspiration and combining ideas from different industries to create new products and services.

For example, we can link ideas from food to the banking industry, like a drive-through restaurant that can be applied to a bank.

We can make incremental innovations, such as making gradual changes to a product or service by adding new features and improving them to become more comprehensive products and services.

By using the Design Thinking principles, such as capturing various requirements and use cases, we can develop more functional products or services meeting the specific needs of a range of clients, delighting them.

We can create hackathons by bringing people from different backgrounds to work on specific problems for our business. This can lead to rapid innovation and the development of creative solutions.

HR departments can use the concept of job swaps and cross-functional collaboration in different departments mixing people with different expertise and taking them out of their comfort zones.

How to Develop Skills for Combinatorial Innovation

Our knowledge and skills in different areas can allow us to create combinatorial innovation for personal and professional use.

I want to provide a few steps to speed up combinatorial innovation for your needs and the requirements of your employees.

1 — First, adopt a curious, growth mindset with a realistic, optimistic outlook, and work in a flow state.

2 — Identify your knowledge and skills gaps and fill them in systematically.

3 — Gain knowledge and experiences from different domains and disciplines. And inspire your team members to do the same by being a role model for them.

4 — Understand the requirements of your customers and other stakeholders using agile methods and Design Thinking workshops.

5 — Connect and collaborate with people from different backgrounds.

6 — Experiment incrementally and safely working in your risk zone.

7 — If you are a business owner, allow your employees to bring new ideas and give them responsibility and accountability to create their own solutions without judging or micromanaging them.

By practicing combinatorial innovation in your personal life, you can create hobbies, connect with others more meaningfully, and improve your life satisfaction.

At work or for your business, by leveraging existing concepts, ideas, technologies, tools, products, and services, you can create new and innovative solutions to stay ahead of the competition.

When you make combinatorial innovation a lifestyle, you will never have dull moments in your life. What you need is to move from your comfort zone, stay curious, embrace uncertainty, learn new things, take calculated risks, and experiment safely.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

As a new reader, please check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting my reviews, observations, and decades of experiments optimizing my hormones and neurotransmitters. I write about health as it matters. I believe health is all about homeostasis.

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