Creativity
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We tend to think of an innovation as a new product but you can innovate with a new process, method, business model, partnership, route to market or marketing method. Indeed every aspect of your business operation is a candidate for inonovation.
Discussions about innovation are often made difficult because people are unclear about the exact meanings of some key terms. In particular there is confusion about the difference between creativity, innovation and invention. Creativity is the capability or act of conceiving something original that have value Creativity is a renewable resource. It's not something you run out of. Innovation is the implementation of something new. Innovation is ideas made useful. Invention is the creative of something that has never been made before and is recognized as the product of some unique insight. If you have a brainstorm meeting and dream up dozens of new ideas then you have displayed creativity but there is no innovation until something gets implemented. Somebody has to take a risk and deliver something for a creative idea to be turned into an innovation. An invention might be a product or device or method that has never existed before. So every invention is an innovation. But every innovation is not an invention. When your company first published its website that was a major innovation for the company even though many other websites already existent. |
Innovation is not about new Products and techologie.
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Most companies focus most of their innovation efforts on new products and product extensions, according to research by the consultancy Doblin. But these kinds of innovations, it turns out, are the least likely to return their cost of investment, with a success rate of only 4.5 percent. Instead, Doblin found, companies get the highest return on investment when they focus on things such as improving business models, internal processes, and customer experience.
"The most valuable innovations are platform-level innovations," says Larry Keeley, a director at Deloitte and the author of Ten Types of Innovation. Though Apple is rightly famous for well-designed devices, he says, "Apple's most valuable innovation is the iTunes store." Almost as integral to Apple's success have been the company's aggressive tax-avoidance strategies--such as creating offices and subsidiaries in low-tax locales such as Nevada, Ireland, and the British Virgin Islands. "It's created a very advantaged business model," says Keeley. Similarly, Amazon makes little money on Kindle sales. The device's real value comes from the way Amazon has linked it to its massive inventory of e-books. Other examples of nonproduct innovation include the collaborative-consumption models of Zipcar or Airbnb, Zappos's positioning of itself as "a service company that just happens to sell shoes," and the values-driven strategies of Patagonia and Whole Foods.
Rather than obsessing over your next new product or service, it might be smarter to work on a new profit model or a better customer experience. Opportunities abound for CEOs who recognize that the next big idea just might come from the CFO rather than an engineer. |
Innovation is Not costly.
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In its annual Global Innovation 1000 study, the consulting group Booz & Company has consistently found no correlation between a company's research and development spending and how innovative it is ranked by peers. What's more, it has found no relationship between R&D dollars and financial performance. In Booz's most recent survey, from 2012, the top 10 R&D spenders actually underperformed their industry peers in terms of both market capitalization and revenue growth.
Apple, ranked as the most innovative company for the past three years, spends just 2.2 percent of its sales on R&D efforts. That's well below the industry average of 6.5 percent for computing and electronics and far less than rivals such as Google, Samsung, and Microsoft. In fact, Apple ranks 53rd among the 1,000 top R&D spenders in all industries. "There's a logic fallacy that if you spend more, you get more innovation," says Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT and an adviser on innovation to companies such as Procter & Gamble and Herman Miller. Measuring innovation properly, Schrage says, means getting away from looking at inputs--that is, your R&D dollars--and focusing on the outputs that your efforts are generating with customers. "Unless you can show that customers and clients are getting more value from your new offerings," Schrage says, "it's less likely to be innovation and more likely to be waste.
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Innovation is Not about being the first.
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Innovation is often associated with the visionary, who invents something new and is first to market. And that's a great strategy--if you're patenting a blockbuster drug. But if your aim is to sell more-quotidian goods and services, research tells us that there are advantages to arriving late to the party.
This is especially true in emerging industries or sectors, where you don't have to look far for cases of second and third movers that let pioneers beat a path, only to come in and blow them away: Nintendo vs. Atari, Amazon vs. Book.com, Google vs. Yahoo. In a 2010 study, University of Chicago researchers Stanislav Dobrev and Aleksios Gotsopoulos found that companies that enter new industries at an early stage actually have a first-mover disadvantage, failing at a much higher rate than those that wait. It turns out that first-to-market pioneers suffer from higher costs that eventually overwhelm their profit advantage. As a result, over the long term they are less profitable than second- or third-generation followers. What's more, first-mover advantages are on the decline. Why? For one thing, the pace of follow-on innovation has increased dramatically. In "The Myth of First Mover Advantage," a study published last year by consulting group IHS, business analysts Erik Darner and Justin Pettit found that in the past century, the average span between introduction of an innovation and follow-on competition has fallen from 33 years to just 3.4 years. What's more, Darner and Pettit's research found that unless first movers enjoy one of three conditions--a significant learning curve for followers; the ability to preempt competitors for scarce resources, whether raw materials or a specific talent; or high customer-switching costs--there is no advantage to going first.
By contrast, followers have a multitude of ways to topple pioneers, including improving or simplifying a product, offering superior service or an alternate format, or simply outmarketing them. |
All ideas are made from other ideas |
Few people mention the millions of “epiphanies” people have had that ended in failure. We love stories of flashes of insight and they dominate how creativity is reported. Epiphanies are a consequence of effort, not just the inspiration for it. No idea is completely original, as all ideas are made from other ideas. When you hear a story about a flash of insight, the useful questions to ask are
1) how much time the creator spent working before the flash happened, 2) how many ideas from other people they reused and 3) how much work they did after the flash to make the idea successful. An epiphany doesn’t find investors, make prototypes, sacrifice free time or persist in the face of rejection: only you can do that and you’ll have to do it without a guarantee of success. |
Inspiring lies are often more popular than complex truths. |
We romanticize the past to fit the present, creating traps for creatives who don’t know the true history of their own field. Inspiring lies are often more popular than complex truths. And history is heavily tainted by survivorship bias. History is not a straight line of progress, which means the present isn’t either. Innovation is OLD and the tactics for trying to change the present are ancient. Why did America succeed when 90+% of revolutions fail? Was there anything really special about the Rosetta Stone? Dominant ideas aren’t necessarily good ones. Find the biggest idea in your field and dig in: you’ll be surprised at what you find beneath the surface that helps your work in the present.
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Nobody likes new ideas |
We are a conservative species: try something as simple as standing, rather than sitting, in your next group meeting. How accepting were your peers? Conformity is deep in our biology. While talking about creativity is very popular, actually being creative puts your social status at risk. All great ideas were rejected, often for years or decades, yet we bury this in our history (see Myth #1 & #2). The history of breakthroughs is a tale of persistence against rejection. Much of what makes a successful innovator is their ability to persuade and convince conservative people of the merits of their ideas, a very different skill from creativity itself. Your problem is likely not your ideas, but your skills for pitching ideas to others. Ideas are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. The bigger the idea, the harder the persuasion challenge.
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Collaborate, give and receive feedback |
It’s easier to worship a hero if they are portrayed as superhuman. But even people worthy of the title genius or prodigy like Mozart, Picasso and Einstein had family and teachers who taught them. Many of Edison’s patents are shared with co-workers, as despite his huge ego he knew collaboration was critical (His Menlo Park office was one of the first research labs). Stories of mad geniuses who worked completely alone are rare. Pick any master who you think worked alone and read some of their history: you’ll be surprised how many people influenced their work. Learning to collaborate, and give and receive feedback, may matter more than your brilliance.
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We are built for creativity |
If you watch any 6 year old child they will invent dozens of things in an hour. We are built for creativity. The problem is the conventions of adult life demand conformity and we sacrifice our creative instincts in favor of social status. Unlike a child, adults are supremely and instantly judgmental, killing ideas before they’ve had even a moment to prove their worth. It’s easy to rediscover creativity, which is why brainstorming rarely helps much. We’re already creative. The challenge is ideas don’t come with the courage to invest in them. Good ideas are everywhere: what’s uncommon is people with the conviction to put their reputation behind ideas.
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innovation requires a willingness to defy convention. |
A fallacy of workplaces is that senior staff are better at everything than the people who work for them. This is false in many ways, but creative intuition might be the most false. To rise in power demands good political judgement, yet innovation requires a willingness to defy convention. Convention-defiers are harder to promote in most organizations, yet essential for progress. To assume senior staff are the best at leading change is a mistake.
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Inspiration
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In order to employ design thinking, it’s necessary to understand it as a system of overlapping spaces, rather than a set of process steps to move through. Those spaces are: inspiration, during which the problem that motivates solution-finding is identified; ideation, the process of generating and developing ideas; and implementation, the activities that enable a creative idea to move from the drawing board to the marketplace. Any design thinking-based project may loop back to an earlier space more than once as a team explores, develops, and implements its idea.
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All Innovation Involves Risks. |
Organizations serious about fostering innovation have to wrestle with two main issues: risk-taking and failure aversion. All innovation involves risk, and all risks include the possibility of failure. Failure should never be seen as a black mark; it is a learning experience. Leaders and their organizations cannot be afraid of failure — or they will never incorporate the innovation they need.
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