This site is about innovation and how you create innovation.
Could you live without innovation?
Here is a challenge. When you wake up tomorrow morning before you get out of bed vow to spend your day living a life that doesn’t make use of something that at one time was an innovation.
Well you’ve immediately failed because unless you are lying out on the savanna curled up under a tree you are probably lying on some form of bed – a contraption that someone invented, refined, refined and refined again until the product on which you have been sleeping was developed.
If you wake up warm and comfortable its probably because you are in house that is heated or cooled, so many innovations here we would quickly lose count.
Its unlikely that you will head out to the woods to collect wild eggs or kill a pheasant for breakfast. Instead you will sit down to food that was bought at the supermarket, food that will be easy and quick to prepare.
Take a shower before you leave the house and….
Get in your car or catch a bus and….
Well you get the idea.
Virtually everything we do in developed countries uses something that was at one time an innovation.
This Site and Innovation
If you look at stories of innovation you see a process emerging. A process that starts with an idea, goes on to development and finally an innovation emerges.
This site looks at all three steps:
The creative process that gives rise to ideas
The development process in which there is often much failure
The innovation, being the introduction of a new idea and how its accepted.
The material in the site is often presented in the form of stories or anecdotes that illustrate part of the three step process.
Who would find the site useful?
A business that wants to build its value must innovate, whether in its marketing strategy or business model.
But innovation is not easy and its not formulaic.
Innovation starts in the realm of the unknown and feeds on “what if”, as opposed to “we know how to do it” and “that’s the way its done”. Accordingly in addition to tenacity innovation requires the ability to live in a state of ambiguity, to be imaginative, and to sometimes be bold.
The realms of ideas and development are often mirky and fuzzy, you think you know where you are going but it turns out you were going somewhere else.
The goal of this website is to portray, through examples of ideas and processes, the diversity and unexpected nature of the innovative process.
If you can find an innovation that brings value to your customer you can recover value from your customer and build the value of your company.