Category: Innovation

When a new innovation appears, we often “ooh” and “gasp” and wonder how soon we can bring it into our lives. But often, what we take for innovation is simply a recycling of an idea within a new context. When Derek Jenkins linked to the image above, it made me wonder how many contextual innovations like this we could find from the past.

Of course, what any innovation is attempting to do, is solve a problem – and any solution is going to be bound by the limits of available (or scalable)technology and the willingness of the society to absorb and adopt the innovation.

As a child I expected the 2000s to be a time of robot housekeepers and flying cars. But I have a feeling that such expectations are to do with linear thinking – identify problem, extrapolate issue, propose solution. For me, the most interesting aspect of innovation is the discontinuous type – where a product or idea seems to come “out of the blue”. But when I really think about it, I find it hard to find a real example that cannot be linked to something else – some thinking, a predecessor or some contextual innovation.

Maybe there really is nothing new under the sun.

Take a look around you. Look across the office where you work. Turn to the colleague across the hall. Walk through the corridors to the warehouse, or to the shopfront. Look in at the staff canteen. Open the doors into the cool rooms that house your business’ computer servers.

What’s the most valuable commodity to your business? What does it look like? Can you describe it in 10 words or less? 

Now think of your home. Think of the most valuable commodity you have there. Does it have a name? A nickname?

So now, think about the name of your most valuable (business) commodity. Is someone, somewhere thinking about your business commodity as their most valuable (personal) commodity? What would you need to do to change that?

Inspired by Kyle Lacey’s post: The most valuable commodity is information.

or my entire life I have been in love with ideas. From the moment I could read I was in another world – the world of ideas – and it is the seductive gravity of ideas that continues, to this very day, to pull me towards books, towards blogs and towards people.

As a six or seven year old I was given a bedraggled pile of history workbooks to keep me quiet during the school holidays. Some were used and some were new. Some had covers, while others lay their knowledge bare from the very first page; yet in each and every book I saw promise. And as I began to read, it felt as though my mind was spreading out beyond the horizon.

But it is not just ideas that captured my imagination. After all, I was reading history books – and history is about events, achievement, challenges, outcomes and the stories of success and failure. In each and every chapter I was captured by the ideas of the explorers and enthralled by the way that the execution of their ideas led to astounding success or abject failure – and sometimes death. But the breathtaking aspect of history is the profound change that can sweep through the cultures left in its wake.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), very few of us can have this type of profound change on more than our immediate circle of friends or family. And the more ambitious we are with our ideas, the more resistance we are likely to encounter. In this presentation from the PFSK Good Ideas Salon, Mark Earls explains just how difficult and slow change can be – Heinz, for example, took over 120 years to change the orientation of the label on their sauce bottles.

It is Mark’s interesting take on ideas and the way that they can drive mass change that fascinates me. His well-known book, Herd is a must read for anyone trying to transform the way that we think and the way that we act – but if you are new to Mark’s thinking, this presentation is an excellent primer.

Mark argues that there are five reasons why new ideas matter:

1. New ideas allow us to test the power and validity of our old ideas. The new ideas provide us a framework and a lens through which we can test the assumptions upon which we have built businesses, brands and successful careers
2. New ideas help us to explore the future. Even if the ideas that we are considering don’t have longevity, they may actually create the conditions for lasting, transformative change (hint: it is important to play and participate)
3. New ideas provide you (or your organisation) with hacks for new products. Given that a large percentage of new products fail within the first year (Mark suggests 90-95% in the UK), then new ideas can actually help you solve problems that you have yet to accommodate within your existing product or service portfolio.
4. Engaging with new ideas allows us to move faster. Known as “memories of the future” (based on the work of Swedish neuroscientist, David Ingvar), our brains are constantly evaluating current information (conscious and unconscious signals) within a context that combines the immediate with “past events, experiences and acquired knowledge”: see Ulf Pilkahn’s Using Trends and Scenarios as Tools for Strategy Development. By working with new ideas we are able to assess and adapt to new, new ideas as they arise. Consider it a form of business agility.
5. New ideas help improve the financial performance of our businesses – because a large percentage of our economies are based on services businesses, finding ways to engage and promote the social (person to person) interactions that lie at the heart of a services-based economy, we will invigorate and transform not just the way that our organisations operate, but also the network of relationships that surround them.

My view here is that the same conditions are mirrored in the social networking/social media world. Often when people are first introduced to blogs, to Facebook or to Twitter (or all three at once), they are overwhelmed and wonder how it is that they can deal with the avalanche of information. However, it is precisely because of this immersion (and the memories of the future effect in point 4 above) that PARTICIPANTS are able to absorb, assess and respond with ever increasing speed – after a while the shifting landscape no longer appears as dangerous as expected – and the "new" simply becomes the "next" if only for a moment.