Innovation isn’t just the domain of engineers, designers and other creative product types and functions inside organizations. Everyone and every function has the opportunity to innovate in pursuit of serving internal or external customers, improving business processes and helping the firm achieve strategic objectives.
It’s too bad that many of us don’t recognize our innovation obligation and opportunity.
People focus on the all-new, all-new product and technology innovations that make our news headlines. This discontinuous innovation while exciting and big and sometimes transformational, is actually quite rare. Most innovation is continuous in nature…more incremental than of the all new variety.
My working definition of innovation is: “solving vexing problems in unique and reproducible ways.” While I have no doubt that there may be better and even shorter definitions, mine opens up the innovation frontier to the broad range of “problems” inside and outside of organizations. My only catch is that the solution be both unique and reproducible.
Jump-starting your innovation thinking can be as simple as brainstorming with your colleagues on the headaches, time and cost wasters and bottlenecks that affect your customers and impede goal achievement. Pick one, apply my definition and solve.
Rinse and repeat. Happy innovating!