Innovationsight

This is the essential starting place for anyone who wants to be an innovation leader. Some people innovate because they cannot stop themselves: after all, we humans are tool builders and tinkerers always looking to make something new and better. But most of us innovate because we must. Something that irritates us can be made less annoying; something that intrigues us can be made compelling. Ultimately when things change in the world we must take action. We improve the known or invent the new because if we don’t change we become irrelevant.

Innovation is probably different than you think

Innovation should surprise us. Whether it is the elegant design and pleasure of using an iPod, or the thrilling smoked foam and Parmesan ice cream sandwiches created by Ferran Adrià at el Bulli, true innovation is never obvious, it demands curiosity and rewards courage. But what often comes as a surprise to people trying to master innovation is that the very nature of the field and its practice has fundamentally changed in the last decade or so.

Most of us assume that innovation consists mainly of some hot new product. In fact, the most recent research clearly shows that new products today are swiftly copied in the world and are rarely profitable. Others assume that innovation is fundamentally about creating a proprietary technology. Here again, be prepared for a stunner: all the best technologies today get licensed quickly, in an attempt to make them a global standard.

These are just some of the reasons why it is especially important now to think like a leader when you try to master innovation. Today most great innovations combine many smaller advances into an integral whole that no one has done before. The breakthroughs we all need in healthcare, in transportation, housing, materials sciences, logistics, education, computing, telecommunications, and sustainability across the board are likely to arise when we start to imagine a more coherent and impressive way to live-then pull many known pieces together to make something that provides a startlingly new and better experience.

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