Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

Innovation is one of those words that belongs in a series of Rorschach blots.  Its meaning generally resides in the individual. The act of defining it seems to confine it.  I think innovation far more flexible than that.

Innovation is perhaps the most durable star on the corporate ladder -- quickly out pacing such top ten hits as TQM, Lean and Six  Sigma. 

In a technology frenzied world -- is innovation becoming too lofty a science?  Many of the people in my creativity seminars see innovation as an process done by someone else.  It is something done by engineers and visionaries.  Personal innovation seems like an oxymoron.   Books on innovation are becoming increasing obtuse. (IDEO's Tom Kelly is a wonderful exception).

Scott Berkun's book "The Myths of Innovation" is a great primer on bringing innovation down from the Ivory Tower and into the minds of the rest of us.   I recently talked with the Markus Mettlerm CEO of  the BrainStore in Switzerland and we discussed the extremes of innovation in the U.S.  A lot of high end technical approaches (TRIZ) and the more typical un-facilitated brainstorming.

Gerald Haman of Solution People makes an important distinction between creativity and innovation. Creativity is primarily about generating and presenting new ideas. Innovation is about implementing those ideas and creating value the marketplace. I often use my favorite example to illustrate these ideas. Andrew Wyeth is one of my favorite painters  His artistic vision and virtuosity is about creativity.

But have you ever heard of his brother? Nathaniel Wyeth's most famous invention, one of the most convenient and readily recyclable items available for sale today, is the plastic soda bottle. That's innovation.

One of the goals in my workshops is to humanize innovation. It isn't forged in marble. It is not the mythic "eureka" that rules, but the tipping point of incremental knowledge and experimentation often by people on the fringe or upset with the status quo.  As Berkum reports, "The Internet required nearly four decades of innovations in electronics, networking an packet-switching software before it approximated the system Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web."

So, how do we put a human face on innovation? I think it begins by not putting innovation or the process of innovation on a pedestal. Google didn't invent the search engine. Remember Alta Vista? Instead, they improved and capitalized on the idea. Somebody saw a wine bottle and observed that it needed to be accessorized and now wine bottle jewelry is huge niche business.

The truth is innovation isn't glamorous.  It's long pizza-infused nights filled with both drive and disappointment.  It is Jobs and the Woz in the garage.  It's the You Tube guys sitting at a party discussing how difficult it is to share videos.  It's George de Mestral walking through the woods and wondering why cockleburs stuck to his pants and recreating nature in what became Velcro. Innovation is work. It is the nature of corporations to want apply processes, tools, methodologies and benchmarks to innovation. Many of them, like TRIZ and Haman's 4-step accelerated innovation process are terrific. Here's a slightly different point of view. Take Flickr -- it started as a collaboration of Vancouver programmers who were focused building an online game called Game Neverending. To make the game more interesting they added a simple tool that allowed players to talk, exchange messages and share photos. After some time had passed the photo sharing tool was a more promising building than the game itself. The innovation had nothing to do with their originally stated goal.

In the great pantheon of innovative ideas there are some (Like the integrated circuit) that are Nobel material. The Frisbee may not win a prize, but it created value in the marketplace. And for every corporate Google innovation, there's an individual with an equally compelling idea that hasn't been shared. My thesis? That we loosen the noose on the word innovation -- let it breathe for a while. Rather than become an innovation company,  become a company or an individual  who is motivated to solve a problem or has a vision of something that no one else sees.

Combine tools and processes and even outsource ideation.  But let's focus on growing ideas and let the
 marketplace decide whether it's innovative.