“What is Jazz?… “…if you hafta ask, you ain’t never gonna know!” – btw, wrongly attributed to Louis Armstrong, because it was Jazz pianist Fats Waller who said that.

So now let us consider this:

Replace the word “Jazz” with “Innovation” in the above quote… You are likely to get my point. In other words, there is no highly and tightly choreographed, set-piece color-by-number play in either, playing Jazz or Innovating to create what never existed before.

I bet, I have made enemies with many leading consultants who pitch their “Innovation” procedural to industry, much like a TV police procedural, or cook book recipe, to get innovation going.

No startup, going back to Karl Benz or garage startups of Hewlett-Packard and Jobs-Woz fame used any scripted framework. It was ad-hoc, develop a thesis, create a vision, choose a tool or invent one to overcome whatever impediment stood in the way. Test it out live – skin in the game with $$$ transactions and not just verbal pronouncements – in the market before it gets out of the incubator.

Going back to Police Procedural, the most famous police show ever made for TV, “The Wire” was a tremendous success because, well, it was NOT a procedural. Just go ask its creator David Simon. (He was a beat reporter for Boston Globe.)