So Y’All Want Some of That Innovation?

You say you want to be innovative? Great! You want to foster a culture of innovation in your company? Sure, who doesn’t? You want to inspire innovation in yourself, your employees, your team, your family, your neighbors, your butcher? Sounds fantastic!

Everyone wants to “innovate.” Market practitioners scream from atop Twitter that your company will die without it, crushed by the weight of a thousand starry eyed startups salivating at the prospect of being bought by Amazon. I hope some day to find a corporate executive honest enough to say outright that the matter of innovation is too risky to undertake.

Among those stating this desire, what I see routinely lacking is a working definition of “innovation.”

Googling “define:innovation” we get:

noun: the action or process of innovating

So, no help there … and I’m certainly too lazy to take the next step of Googling “innovating.” Please report back if it’s useful.

As a developer and consummate builder of crap, I’m often hamstrung by the notion that to innovate I have to be producing something earth-shattering. This led to many initiatives which were too expensive, too time consuming, too lengthy to hold my interest, and too likely to fail in light of the above.

Let us consider then the following working definition of innovation

Innovation: Doing Something More Better

That is, take something that you are doing today and find ways to do it better.

The iPod is oft touted as a supreme example of innovation in the 21st (20th? When did the iPod come out? If only I was not so intransigent in my laziness) century. People already had means to take their music on the go though. Walkman was still highly useful and Diskman had advanced to multi-second read ahead so as to avoid disruption due to movement. What did iPod do? It let people take their listening on the go … better.

In this light of doing something better, even small steps can be seen, touted, measured, and recognized as innovative. Formalizing a repeatable process for a matter you encounter regularly may be a highly impactful innovation. The production and promulgation of a checklist may be eminently innovative. A small pilot to see if adoption of a new technology betters outcomes in some area of your business, a small addition to what you are able to measure, a codification of a mental model around some work you already do, are all potentially valuable innovative initiatives which should be temporally and fiscally scoped so as to fly under the radar of your finance department.

Innovation in your company then need not be a big bang (or big flop), a massively over engineered top-down corporate program, or a one time flash in the pan investment. Small steps towards doing things better are much greater steps towards sustained innovation, and encouragement, enablement, measurement, and recognition thereof are what make it part of your culture.