Innovation: If You Don’t Know Where It’s Heading, You’re Probably Doing It Right

Digital leader in transformative change, angel investor, board member. COO at Thoughtexchange and former CDO at STS Student Travel Schools. getty If you take a quick glance through any major business publication, you’ll no doubt see “innovation” mentioned more times than you can count. Innovation is apparently everywhere, and such a ubiquitous idea should be pretty well understood. For me, innovation remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in today’s world of business. Raised as an objective in the boardroom, it will commonly be put forward as a way of extending or improving a standard routine: “Here’s how we do things, let’s innovate and do more of it, cheaper and faster.” In my opinion, this wholly misses the meaning and value inherent in its practice. Innovation, in its most elemental state, is unvarnished, open-ended creativity. It’s finding a solution at an odd angle, treading untrodden ground, being surprised, not walking a familiar path. It’s the search to find something new — a process, an application or a widget that seemingly springs from a random collection of ideas and experiments and brings about a revolution. For this reason, I believe that if you know the outcomes you are looking to […]

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