“Because, you know, resilience — if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new question sand two new opportunities” — Jeff Bezos
For all the work blood, sweat, and tears young entrepreneurs invest in the innovation process, their efforts might never pan out if they fail to grasp the conceptual framework that underlies innovation.
One of the most popular Silicon Valley-inspired concepts that helps us understand innovation is fail fast. Unfortunately, sometimes this concept gets misconstrued due to the persevering stereotype that failure is bad for us. It’s true that failure can be traumatic, but for all the emotional burden if brings, it never fails to provide some valuable insights if and only if we choose to learn from it on intellectual level. What we need to do to emerge from failure as a winner is to rebound new ideas from the things that didn’t quite work out the last time. And if those ideas won’t be working, don’t hesitate to throw them in the trash, for they’ve paved the way for the new, fresh and, hopefully, more viable and workable ideas to come. The point is, we are not failing fast for the sake of failure, we are doing it in order to become better at searching for the right answers. Thus, fast failure is a tool that helps us refine and fine-tune our search process which can ultimately make us more successful at innovation.
One of the most iconic inventors of all time, Thomas Edison, had failed time and time again before coming up with a workable design of a light bulb, but in the end he said
“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
What kept him going was the innate drive to learn and the realization of how important this invention was to the world.
One might ask, is fast failing really the answer? Can we become better at searching without ever needing to fail? What if someone were to come up with brilliant design right from the start and implement it in their business? The answer lies in the nature of the business itself. The situation on the market is constantly changing and what might have been brilliant at some point would one day become mediocre. And so the innovator will be back to square one and faced with the new challenges of the day. So even if someone were to come up with a brilliant idea that, perhaps, even revolutionized a whole industry one day, at some point in the future he would be challenged to recreate his success.
The process of innovative value creation is powered by searching and learning from your search and is very experiential in nature. You cannot become successful innovator by building theories alone. For sure, some of the key concepts need to be mastered, but most of the work lies in systematic organized learning. In order to become a successful learner, one has to manage this process accordingly, that is, to follow some of the basic principles:
- intentional engagement in the activity (or, shall we say, mindful engagement);
- receiving accurate feedback in real time;
- iterative process;
- team work;
- having a guide, a mentor or any other figure serving as a role model;
- building internal and external motivation;
- shaping creativity-friendly mindset.
This last point of building creativity-friendly mindset is especially relevant in regard to innovation. Unleashing one’s creativity is one of the prerequisites of innovation and has to do with adapting certain habits of thinking. This means to get the gray matter working by thinking out of the box. It is about being flexible and employing unusual thinking patterns in order to find some new non-traditional approach to the problem. Such a mental skill is a true asset for innovators of all kinds and, like any skill, it can be developed through exercise. Applying new conceptual frameworks can be hard at first, but it is the only way to become an expert innovator.
Thus, true innovation rests on the three pillars: searching, learning and creating. Innovation is an ongoing never-ending search for the right answers in the process of experience-based learning in the context of constantly changing market which occurs through the agency of creative mindset.
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