Where’s Your Next Innovation?

Creative people have a failproof approach to success

Innovation is the lifeblood of future growth. Without ongoing innovation, the competition will likely outperform our current products or services.

Where does innovation come from?

Innovation requires change, collaboration, and recombination. We all can be innovative if we become intentional about these three elements. Many great inventions that have improved our lives have involved all three aspects of chance, collaboration, and recombination.

Sticky notes were the result of failed glue. Polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE was discovered by accident and is now used to make non-stick pans and Gore-Tex products. The list goes on and on. Each resulted from an intersection of chance, collaboration, and recombination. So can your next great idea.

Lesson to Learn

Although it may sometimes feel like magic, it is more common sense.

We need to be open to what is happening around us; collaborate with colleagues, friends, and chance acquaintances, and seek to recombine our learnings in new and exciting ways.

Innovation, which is so vital to our success, is available to all of us.

When we put ourselves into situations that maximize these conditions, we can dramatically increase our creativity.

Answer for Me

I am not sure I have ever had an original idea. However, I have routinely combined and reused other successful innovative solutions to create something new and exciting.

I seek creative people who look at the world from a different angle. I have learned to enjoy learning. I develop my unique way of scanning the environment, seeking interesting colleagues and friends, and reworking excellent ideas into something better.

One of my favorite strategies is to seek to be with others who can teach me new things.

I prefer to be the least smart person in any group that I am in. I learn more that way. I seek ways to be a good friend or colleague so that when a new opportunity arrives, relationships are already built. And finally, I seek unique means to apply my new lessons learned in a different environment adapting it to the situation.

It’s a lot of hard work — but both exciting and rewarding. It also reinforces a virtuous cycle of future innovations and opportunities.

Action

Spend time learning about innovation, and its simple common-sense approaches. Become a student of innovators you know in your personal life and those famous for it — experiment with creating new ideas used in your life and at work.

Rely on chance encounters as well as planned efforts. Collaborate as often as possible.

Take good ideas and recombine them in new ways.

Don’t be afraid to try and fail — all creatives and innovators do. The best of them fail many times before they succeed.

Daily Habits

Each day can offer you insights into innovative approaches — chance encounters, new relationships, and insights into new business ways.

The small idea today could mean return tomorrow.

Give yourself the time to think about the possibilities. Ask the next question that comes to mind instead of saving it until a later date. Be inquisitive. Review what you have learned each day and ask yourself if you could use it in your life — at work or at home.

Celebrate the little wins because they could turn into the next great innovation.

To learn more about leadership, visit me at www.macny.org.

To get a copy of my book Present-Future Leader, go to www.amazon.com.