This is what Innovation really is

When ‘Innovation’ is more than a buzzword branding term for ‘good business’, it has the power to produce excellent business.

Let’s be honest. Most businesspeople only say that they are innovative because the cool kids are doing it. They don’t really know what it means, but they sense that ‘We are innovative’ is this moment’s crucial piece of self-branding. If you’re not claiming it, you probably don’t follow Elon on Twitter, or have six AI best friends, or wi-fi. Get with the times grandad.

For many, innovation is the sexy way of saying, ‘We do business well/We are smart and make good decisions/We make changes that have good outcomes.’ If this is all there is to the word innovation, then it is just as empty a boast ‘We are awesome, we promise.’ If that’s it, let’s acknowledge ‘innovation’ as a clever marketing buzzword that has really taken off, and get over it.

Yet, our Innovation Interviews have proven that the term ‘innovation’ has distinct, valuable meaning to some of the smartest and most influential people in our business world. Their interpretations have given them the insights that enable them to excel.

Here are some wonderful insights on what innovation really is:

A certain kind of invention

According to Alex Shabala of Zoona, a business action is only an ‘innovation’ if it satisfies four very specific criteria:

1. you have a new idea
2. the idea is a good solution to an existing problem
3. the idea is implemented at the right time
4. the idea is executed well

Because of this understanding, whenever Shabala seeks to innovate, he pursues creations that are:

• Genuinely new. They are truly inventions that are likely to offer novel consequences because the idea is meaningfully different from those that existed before it.
• Genuinely useful. Shabala dislikes ‘invention for the sake of inventing’. He expects an innovative product to be a solution to a problem, because this ensures that the creation improves on an existing situation.
• Genuinely impactful. Ideas must be executed effectively and at the right moment, when all of the necessary resources are available for the business to implement the idea, and the market is capable of using the offering. Shabala does not believe that a good idea that is executed poorly or released before it or the market is ready for it (in a sense, releasing a product before the world is ready for it amounts to poor execution) should be called an innovation.

Shabala’s criteria provides checklist for how to have and handle ideas, and a metric to measure whether one has made the best of an idea or not.

A certain kind of mentality

Olaf Brinkmann calls it a different way of doing business. Peter Kariuki calls it saying no to business as usual. Paul Galatis calls it being conscious of how to improve the things that one does. Allen Huang calls it challenging the status quo to bring about change and challenging the way you work.

And Anima Anandkumar, lead scientist at Amazon Web Services, calls it a way of life that could be disruptive, but also continuous, taking what is existing and bringing something new, and improving what is currently there.

For these people, innovation is a mental approach to work that is defined by proactive, unending questioning and evaluating. Every part of business is constantly up for review, consideration and change. No matter how long a working convention has been around, or how fresh and exciting an opportunity is, it must be deconstructed and analysed. It must be vulnerable to being rejected or modified. A culture of constant inquiry and willingness to change anything and everything is likely to yield many improvements to a business and avoid preserving elements of a company as time’s progress renders those elements irrelevant. This flexible, considered working style is the way of life that Anandkumar speaks about when she discusses innovation. It’s a mentality.

A certain kind of change

Innovations can be big or small. They can be electricity, or Uber or the iPhone. But they can also be ways of making office-place communication more efficient, or designing the seating layout of meetings to stimulate creativity and focus.

Tamara Japp-Shama of Tencent Africa distinguishes between continuous and disruptive innovation. For her, continuous innovation is like the mentality and culture of innovation that people such Anima Anandkumar speak about. It is a day-to-day eagerness to improve on all aspects of a workplace and how people work in it. Disruptive innovations, on the other hand, are those truly seismic creations that change the way that people view and experience the world, to the point where it becomes unimaginable for people to live without those creations.

For her it is vital to pursue both kinds. The obvious dream of any ambitious worker is to create a world-changing, disruptive innovation. Yet, often, workplaces that are driven by continuous innovation are most likely to ultimately come up with a truly revolutionary idea. They are also most likely to be capable enough to implement that one magical idea, and strong enough to implement it well, because their drive to continuously innovate has caused more powerful working practices.

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