Innovation is all about communication

“Every meaningful element of human progress has happened only because humans have shared ideas with each other and then collaborated to turn those ideas into reality. From the first time our ancestors teamed up to take down a mammoth to Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon, people have turned spoken words into astonishing shared achievements.”

— Chris Anderson, Curator of TED Talks

Chris Anderson closely echoes Geoffrey Moore’s words about innovation and communication in my previous article, and I’ll stay on their wavelength to frame the rest of this article, based on these pillars:

• Language and its empowerment of human communication is arguably mankind’s most disruptive innovation.
• Innovation, in turn, is all about communication. Innovation arguably is communication.
• Communication practices, activities and frameworks are vital to shaping and accelerating the innovation process.

When communication is at its best, innovation is at its best. At Elexicon, we help innovators communicate at their best. Here is why we and our clients believe this and why communication is so vitally important:

The big picture

First, let’s start with the big, ultra-widescreen picture: There have been eras of exploration, industrialization, electrification, motorization, and telecommunication — alongside leaps in science and medicine — that have moved civilization forward, all driven by innovation. I believe we’ve entered a new era, transitioning beyond the Internet Age, that could simply be called the Innovation Age. Never in history has there been so much uncertainty and opportunity around defining what the next era might look like. We’ve all seen forecasts about the high percentage of unknown, yet-to-be-invented industries and careers that will dominate the future economy.

Innovation is not only required for growth, it’s critical to survival — to avoid getting disrupted, left behind and replaced. Or, in short, out-innovated. And the universe of digital transformation, health tech, big data, bandwidth and workplace change is expanding at supersonic speed, meaning innovators are under constant pressure to produce brilliant concepts, clarify their vision and build the next big thing faster than ever before.

Overlaying this big picture, there are some big concerns. Gartner predicts that, while 70% of businesses are transforming to digital, only 30% will succeed. And this aggregation of statistics from Embroker reveals sobering details about how and why as many as 90% of all startups fail, including lack of funding, inadequate leadership, and failure to achieve product-market fit.

From this very high-level vantage point, we can see a rather huge paradox facing innovators and startups. Today’s exponential growth and speed of technological advancement drives opportunities to make lives and livelihoods better. But that growth and speed also fuels innovation’s greatest challenges: to envision the future quickly, to manage increasing complexity, to stay focused on multiple cohorts of people with different insights and concerns — the product team, the stakeholders, end users, and the entire ecosystem.

These are challenges that the best innovators solve with a multifaceted but unified commitment to communication. The leaders of these companies, organizations and startups understand its importance, fund it properly, and transparently demonstrate its significance both internally and externally. Their communication-driven mindset, processes and frameworks are, above all…

• Visual
• Inclusive
• Collaborative
• Iterative

We’ll explore these processes, frameworks and practices in the next sections, but innovators who focus on communication, and align it around those four attributes, achieve:

• A clear (or as clear as possible) vision of the future landscape
• Stakeholder and organizational “all-in,” not just “buy-in”
• A common ground upon which teams can safely contribute insights, ideas and opinions without fragmenting the source concept

These goals are all interconnected, and build a foundation of belief and trust within your ecosystem of internal teams, external stakeholders and partners, and early adopters that you are building the right product at the right time for the right market. And this confidence inevitably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: You build the right thing, you build it right, and you’re offering it to the right customers who are all aware of it and understand it, then buy it and love it.

Communication solves innovation’s biggest challenges

From a sky-level view of today’s landscape for innovation, we can see a map of many adjacent and overlaid territories and ecosystems — and for many innovation initiatives, but much of this map remains uncharted. These territories include our own existing capabilities, customers and competitors, and the unknown regions of new market opportunities, the needs and desires of future customers — and lurking competitive forces. Passageways of technologies intertwine and connect some territories but not others, and some borders are disputed and undefined.

When we venture into an innovation initiative, we are sending a not-yet-fully-defined idea into not-yet-fully-discovered territory. This is where intentional communication and skilled communicators can help first: To better define both the idea and the territory, and do it early on — because as we know, these maps and ecosystems are constantly, quickly changing beneath our feet.

In my next articles, I’ll dig deeper into this and three more of the biggest challenges facing innovators, and how a well-structured plan of communication frameworks and activities can help solve those challenges to help optimize and accelerate innovation.