What is innovation...really?

Innovation is far more difficult, yet far less mysterious than we have been led to believe.

In a time of global warming, energy shortages, recession, conflict and war, many now believe that innovation is perhaps the only way to solve today's challenges. According to a 2009 Kauffman Foundation study, 78% of Americans believe innovation is important to our economic health. 

Innovation will allow us to build more sustainable communities. Innovation will help our countries back down from wars. Innovation will help struggling businesses thrive once again. Innovation will bring food to the hungry, opportunity and freedom, warmth and comfort to those in need.

If only we can find the best ideas, then we can solve problems, win customers and improve our world...

I don't disagree with the idea that innovation can solve our problems, but how did innovation start to be described in almost religious terms? 

Too often, innovation is described as something done only by magical geniuses. Stories dwell mostly on the flash of insight, or "Eureka" moment. How many profiles of innovative companies describe the beginning with a brilliant ideas that led to great success? Scott Berkun, in his marvelous book, The Myths of Innovation, describes this as "They myth of epiphany"

"Even if there existed an epiphany genie, granting big ideas to worthy innovators, they would still have piles of rather ordinary work to do to actualize those ideas.  It is an achievement to find a great idea, but it is a greater one to successfully use it to improve the world."

I worry that too many people are waiting for the "great idea" to solve their problems.  For every Fortune 100 company that started from a brilliant invention in a garage - there are millions of people with great ideas that never went anywhere. And yet, entire industries have been built up to serve the faith of ideas.  Consultants, executives and businesses spend money and time to brainstorm, to elicit and evaluate new ideas.  Investors often make decisions based on a valuation of an idea or business model.  Politicians are evaluated by voters based on the perceived value of their ideas. 

And yet, the success of the company or the government is only partly determined by the quality of the ideas.  Ultimately, inventors are only successful if someone is willing to pay for their invention.  Businesses become profitable not because they have a great business model, but because they persuade enough customers to pay more for something than it costs. Politicians become good leaders through competent management, sound decision making, and quite a bit of slogging back and forth in order to persuade people to work together...the ideas they sold during the election are often left behind or reworked once they enter office.

Sit inside a coffee shop and you can hear any number of brilliant ideas. But unless those ideas are turned into something real, the ideas are worth less than the coffee.

The best ideas don't win. Good ideas that are used for actions, products and new behaviors can win...sometimes.

Think about the most successful companies, the most successful leaders, the most successful countries.  Did they have the best ideas?  Or did they have good ideas that they translated into good products, services, markets, companies, laws, governments, and treaties.  If you look close enough, you can find any number of really bad ideas that those successful entities have used to succeed despite themselves.

So why do we think that ideas are so valuable? Why do otherwise rational people believe that the best ideas will save their company, their country, their family?  

Perhaps it's because ideas, brainstorming, planning are much more fun than the reality of innovation. The reality of innovation is much like the reality of scientific discovery - as exciting as it is to imagine how something works, that imagining is only part of the process.

In very broad terms, the process known as "the scientific method" can be broken down into the following steps: Observation, Hypothesis, Testing/Experiment and Evaluation. Innovation follows the same process:

First, in order to innovate, it is necessary to Observe reality as closely as you can to discover what is currently happening.  

Second, the innovator gets to have fun with ideas - (s)he forms a Hypothesis of what might work better.

Third, that hypothesis needs to be tested in an Experiment prototype or pilot, where a small form of reality is compared to the hypothesis.

Fourth, measurements from the experiment are used to Evaluate the original hypothesis - did it do what was expected?  Can that hypothesis be changed in order to affect the desired change?

Mysterious?  not really.  Both scientists and innovators follow a process, evaluate data and find new answers to old problems.  Science and innovation isn't magic, it's just a way to find the truth - about physics, about business, about politics or about how we live - and then act on that truth in a better way than before.

Easy to understand, but quite often hard to do.  And yet, innovation can become a little easier when faith in "the great idea" is put aside - and "good enough" ideas are put to the test of a scientific or innovative method.