Why Innovation Matters
To be truly innovative, it takes a certain commitment to assumption-shedding, ego-checking, deep-knowledge, and granular opportunity-identification.
“Innovation is valuable not for its novelty but for its ability to drive better outcomes.” I said this on stage at a conference in Russia a couple of months ago and heard that it resonated.
At nearly every meet-up and conference I’ve been to in the few years, the buzzword has been “innovation.” Silicon Valley is booming, the singularity is near, yadayada. A venture capitalist the other day told me that the “innovation” buzzword isn’t a new thing, but just the most recent evolution of a continual obsession with new (which is no surprise). In other words, it’s not particularly innovative to make innovation the topic of conversation.
In any case, there’s nothing wrong with trying to be more innovative. After all, innovation is how society progresses. Innovation is the reason for airplanes and cars and vacuums and the internet.
Innovation is even the reason for more innovation. When someone innovated and figured out how to make coffee more available a long time ago, everybody stopped drinking alcohol (cleaner than water) and started sipping caffeine — apparently the difference was, as you can imagine, remarkable. In fact, being caffeinated (and not drunk) made people more innovative than they’d been in a long time (maybe since the Egyptians, I don’t know). More people talking about new ideas is never a bad thing.
But here’s something I’ve noticed at all these meet-ups and conferences. People want to be innovative for the sake of being innovative rather than to solve problems. Companies are tasked with showing the world that they’re more innovative so that they can differentiate their brand and beat their competitors to the sale, but having a brand that says “I’m innovative” is only 10% of the battle. What happens when the customer who bought into your pitch sees how badly your innovation fails to solve their actual problem? You were too busy being novel to listen to the needs of the stakeholder you’re supposedly trying to serve.
Breakthrough innovation versus incremental innovation. Social innovation versus business innovation. Government innovation versus community innovation. All of these terms encapsulate potentially powerful ideas, but like everything else in life, ideas are nothing without purpose, depth, practicality, and execution. The number of people talking about innovation versus actually innovating to deliver better products, services, and value is astonishing. I don’t have statistics but it’s easy to get a sense by asking prodding questions. You quickly learn who’s talking about new because their image is tied up in it, and who’s talking about new out of a desire to improve the lives of the people they care about.
To be truly innovative, it takes a certain commitment to assumption-shedding, ego-checking, deep-knowledge, and granular opportunity-identification.
Ted Gonder is a social entrepreneur on a mission to even the odds for future generations. Click here to subscribe to quarterly updates, useful links, and lessons learned.