Cracking Innovation

Merriam Webster dictionary defines innovation as;

1. a new idea, device, or method.
2. the act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods.

In business everybody talks about how innovation is crucial for organisations to grow. 

Despite many books were published, lectures were held about it, innovation remains holy grail of businesses around the world. It is there somewhere, but at the same time it is unreachable. 

Organisations launch innovation programs, but sustaining those is challenging for smaller businesses.

There are two ways to target innovation:

1. Focus on the innovation as an “idea”.
2. Focus on the innovation as a “method”.

Elon Musk’s idea of self landing rockets is not new, it had been in humanity’s mind since Jules Verne’s fantasy of reaching the moon. 

Jules Verne’s novel “From the Earth to the Moon” was published in 1865. 104 years later humanity landed on the moon in 1969. 

Jules Verne's was a true innovator in the “idea” sense. He was the first person to imagine a rocket can be used to transport humans to celestial objects. But this does not make Elon Musk a lesser innovator. 

What makes Elon Musk an innovator is his dare, his courage and persistence to solve a difficult problem and his commitment to “failure” as his best tool. 

Since June 2010, rockets from the Falcon 9 family have been launched 129 times, with 127 full mission successes, one partial failure and one total loss of the spacecraft.

There are 100s of new things that were learned during failures, and many smaller scale innovations improved reliability of Falcon family of rockets. 

We can argue therefore Elon Musk had been an innovator in the “method” sense. His team were encouraged to keep innovating on methods to solve difficult problems based on constant stream of failures.  

Focusing on methods can be a fertile ground to drive idea innovations. Which strategy should businesses favour for increased likelihood of success?

Idea innovators are rare breed. It is always the hardest to come up with a weird idea. 

But if we have a worthy problem, we could start with that. We could allow it to drive method innovations, as we dare and embrace failures as our best tool. We relentlessly try until we succeed.

For example, false alerts, spam and clutter are common problems in alarm and notification systems. They can cause poor user experience, frustration, and sometimes catastrophes (think how many accidents were needed to improve an airplane’s dashboard). We could use these problems as launching pads, and include them in our innovation process. 

Innovation programs must be engraved to organisation’s culture. They need to be seen as integral part of the lifecycle, not exceptions. They must be managed, repeated in regular cycles with inclusion of failure as a first class citizen within the process. Each failure needs to be documented and measured forming a repository of inspiration for new ideas. That could work.