Aspects of Innovation

Innovation sits absolutely at the core of what it is to be human and for all the challenges that it brings it is just magical and supremely beguiling.  It is intrinsically a part of us as is our capacity to collaborate.  Collaboration relies upon communication and many of our communication techniques are really very very ancient, residing in the way we use and develop language, and build trust with others. Then there are the innate drives we have that make us curious, that make us explore and record what we see and experience and then usually through sharing create ways to make sense of what we have discovered.

If we want a better understanding of the processes of innovation then we need to think a great deal more about these precious human fundamentals and we need to think far less or not at all about the relatively recent and very mechanistic devices that enterprises purport to use to seamlessly manage their innovation processes.

Innovative activity is not actually only for the favoured few…..

Do we assume that innovation as an activity is something that not everyone can participate in? Do we think it is best considered as the activity of a specialist few.? If the answer here is yes, then this too is a misconception. An all too easy mistake since generally we only hear about the few individuals whose roles get highlighted. Maybe these are the individuals who were close to the early ideas so then we are led to believe that innovation has more to do with “big picture thinking”. The dogged persistence and the sharing of all the minutiae, the iterations along with much that occurs as a result of serendipity – this gets lost, not reported, but it is where the action is, if it doesn’t disappear entirely from view then it seems to be reported in an unglamorous form, which only seems to amplify the misunderstanding.

Taken broadly, the big picture and the dogged persistence aspects of innovation activity are just different sides of the same coin. A further misconception is to categorise them as sequential and hold them apart – just fatal to think of them as a case of first we do this and then we do that – is not at all how it is. There have to be the messy, hard to pin down overlaps between specialists and what they know and their previous experiences and it is vital to make sure that the field is not too narrow. 
There should be constant iteration right on to when there is what seems to be the definitive new thing and then regularly beyond.
From a rational perspective, any suggestion that the boundaries between specialists and early and late phases of innovation ought to be swept away makes a nonsense of the operational aspects of planning and many individuals would say that the only likely outcome here is chaos and increased risk. But, pause too to think of the different form of risk that is introduced by the use of a rational system that favour clarity through the imposition of a narrow field of activity.