Innovation Is Hard — Here’s How to Stop Brainstorming and Make Something Real

-by Jen Shadowens, Strategist

There’s no short­age of talk about how to be innovative.

We read about it all the time in Fast Company, the Harvard Business Review, and Medium, and there are plenty of startups, incubators, and CEOs happy to share their success stories. In all that conversation, you can find as many principles, best practices, methods, and most of all, acronyms, as you could possibly want. (Also, plenty of stock photos of people in suits putting sticky notes on whiteboards and looking inspired. Lovely.)

But no one’s talking about the big and small failures that happen along the way. No one’s talking about why their process isn’t always right for every business. And no one’s talking about what happens when you’re done reading all that inspirational stuff and you actually have to take the next step.

So let’s get real.

The bot­tom line is this:

Every great business or brand is built by people, not processes. And the same is true of innovation. That means you can’t just apply a single system of innovation to every business and expect it to work — you have to adapt innovation to your culture. You have to find the way forward that works for the people who work with you.

We’ve got a lot to say about it, but let’s just start with a few key truths about innovation:

1. Inno­va­tion doesn’t have to come from the top.

It doesn’t have to be about get­ting lead­er­ship buy-in. Cul­tur­al change is what leads com­pa­nies into the future, and it’s just as like­ly to come from small groups of big thinkers as it is from high­er-ups with com­pa­ny-wide plans.

2. Inno­va­tion will die if it’s rel­e­gat­ed to a sin­gle department.

“Inno­va­tion teams” might seem like a good idea, but they tend to get stuck in the cor­ner of the base­ment, churn­ing out ideas that nev­er come to life. Inno­va­tion shouldn’t have spe­cif­ic teams — it should be part of the way every­one thinks.

3. Inno­va­tion isn’t the inevitable prod­uct of inno­v­a­tive thinking.

Inno­va­tion with­out action is just dream jour­nal­ing. It’s writ­ing email drafts in MS Word. Get­ting to inno­v­a­tive out­put is as much about oper­a­tions and cul­ture as it is about ideas. The ideas them­selves aren’t worth much — exe­cu­tion is what counts.

So what’s stop­ping peo­ple from mak­ing inno­va­tion real?

We promoted a survey on LinkedIn, targeted to a dozen industries across roles such as marketing, engineering, innovation, and user experience, asking what’s stopping them from being innovative. And, because we wanted to give people concrete steps to take in order to change their culture from the inside, we used that feedback to develop straightforward and honest tips to encourage progress — no matter what culture you’re working within.

So, here are our ideas for how you can move forward. Not next year. Not next quarter. Not tomorrow. Right now.

What’s stopping you?

There’s no one problem that stands in the way of innovation. And there’s no one solution to making it happen. But there are lots of ways to start.

These small steps could be used by the CEO, but they’re intended for you — the people who keep trying to stay at the forefront of business and keep bringing new thinking and ways of working into your projects, no matter the odds.

We never stop facing down barriers, and it’s easy to get paralyzed into ignoring new ideas or innovating in ways that only scratch the surface of bigger opportunities. But real innovation isn’t just one direction we can choose to pursue — it’s the only way to survive.

Got feedback? Things we missed? Tell us about it! Because examining our failures and successes is the only way we can move forward.

-by Jen Shadowens, Strategist

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Originally published at zeusjones.com.