Embracing Innovation

Many people make the simple mistake of thinking innovation is is a tool and never consider embracing innovation as aa key concept rather than process. They want teams to use it to create something new and then remove the process to get it to a finished position with a deep seated fear of failure controlling every next move on the new product or idea.

Working within software engineering for so many years, I’ve had a front row seat to a lot of this behaviour and seen the impact and effects of innovation done well and not so well and now can share with you the key elements of how to embrace innovation and truly succeed with it as a culture and lifestyle choice.

What is success?

Succeeding can be hard to achieve if you don’t know what the true meaning of success is. How will you know if you have achieved what you are setting out to do? The right goal is really important here: A business will often clone a competitors offering to try and replicate their success without considering the more solid benefits they actually want to achieve from that offering and making offering itself the goal. A goal minus benefits is just a process without a purpose.

Being Creative

Creativity is such an ambiguous term. A creation does not need to be the latest masterpiece at the Tate Modern or the latest experimental symphony using only notes selected through throwing pasta at the wall….. You can train your mind to develop new ideas and change by applying it to your everyday life to see positive change take action. Innovation relies on this to always adapt to changing circumstances.

Review again, and again, and again……. and again.

The best way to know if you’re following the right paths is to always be checking against your success vision. Three great questions to ask yourself is:

• How is what I’m doing going to benefit my goal?
• Is what I’m doing going to bring me closer to my goal?
• Is my goal still relevant to my success vision?

Being Brave

Bravery is relative to every different person and no feat of bravery is less than anyone else’s. Being brave in innovation is being able to do the following to learn how to better achieve your vision:

• Experimentation: find out what works best for you by learning from things that do and don’t work.
• Failure is awesome: What lessons we learn from it! It’s how we get better.
• Fear keeps us safe but it doesn’t progress us forward: What are you willing to invest in your vision?

These questions can be huge or small. The magic is it doesn’t matter if you’re applying it to changing your shampoo or changing your business strategy — the result is always the same: growth.

Being Honest

Change can be a hard thing to accept — but once you do, it’ll make you free. Being honest with yourself, your teams, your family and any other people you influence or influence you is key. By being honest, we’re being brave and being open to change so that we can progress to succeed. If we know exactly what is happening around us, what it is we want to achieve and honestly reviewing our progress, the happy path will always be clear.

Stay tuned to find out how we can apply the above to different areas of our lives,

K