Innovation in Hindsight

I have spent maybe too much time thinking about what innovation is and how I can be innovative. I think my current conclusion is that innovation is elusive because you can’t directly be innovative. There isn’t really a recipe where if you mix the right ingredients at the right proportions you get innovation.

Innovation is more like the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the Higgs Boson. In that situation, scientists smashed particles together a whole bunch of times and then analyzed the data gathered for minuscule traces of the Higgs. 99.999999% of the particle collisions were failures, but each failure led to the possibility of a successful reading.

Innovation is just like that. The innovation recipe as it is today involves the bitter taste of failure which is often masked by other ingredients, but like the search for the Higgs Boson, without failure there could be no success. You can have tools, theories and strategies that help you innovate more efficiently, but your ideas, solutions and implementations can only be deemed innovative when you analyze the aftermath; when you sift through your failures and find your few but powerful successes.

So in hindsight, innovation may occur very readily, but I think the holy grail that everyone is after is innovation in foresight. The ability to reliably conjure innovation before it happens; to predict your successes without failing first. For me, for now, I think I’m going to stop worrying about that. If I can find innovation in hindsight, that’s good enough for me. I’m going to take my tools, theories and strategies of innovation and continue on, never forgetting to analyze my results and realize that every failure is leading me towards success.