Innovation - Generating Ideas: The monkey's view

Not again ..not another hyperbolic session on INNOVATION but these days almost every one in my social circle at least hints about innovation. Not so surprisingly it is a constant endeavour of our species to be introspective and improve continuously, so much so that historians have even classified our cultural heritage in terms of the innovations that have distinguished them viz: the stone age, iron age.. Similarly, the role of innovation at enterprises is pretty much tied with their sustainability and even existence.

 

The dictionary defines the term in a rather half baked manner (blasphemous?!!) while it does appreciates creating the "new thing" it safely discounts the efforts gone into continuous improvement of existing "thing". Sadly the incremental or the continuous improvements made with the existing "things" meets the same fate and goes unnoticed at our enterprises.  

Also, we tend to focus more on the fruits of innovation, that is, the "product" itself and do tend to take the process part for granted and much worse "a necessary evil" at least in my software industry. It is only timely that much work of art is already published (think continuous delivery) but they are yet to make to the mainstream howsoever "agile" the enterprises may like to call themselves.

I understand by now must have already read my mind and must be wondering if I'm really going to add any value... some of the ways I think can make a good start can be summarized as under;

• Become a producer of content.. in my limited scope of understanding I feel most of us do not write or express ourselves or take stand for the fear of being judged. Let's change that and start putting our thoughts in black and white here on blogs, comment on others blogs.. connect. Not many of our experienced leaders write. Writing is such a powerful medium that one can reach out to whole bunch of people at one time which is boon for our time-pressed industry leaders.
• In one of my earlier post I discussed the challenges I faced to share knowledge. Some of the ways sharing knowledge can help is to come out of our stove pipe modes and satiate our higher needs of self actualization. There is this nice article which covers the subject in greater depth and also provides the relevant background knowledge. You will do good to read it for yourself.
• Management determines the organizational climate. It can send a clear message through rewards, mentor employees to participate in open source software products, participation at technical conferences, taking engineers to customer meetings, sales team to participate in test cycles...
• The above mentioned set of activities create and encourage the cross-pollination of ideas which can create magical results.. you never know when that bulb glows in someone's head, the EUREKA moment!!
• Support innovators as per Seth Godin if you don't support and nurture them it simply puts spanner into the innovation engine even before it gained any considerable momentum.

 Innovation is critical to our growth and generating ideas is critical to innovation itself while thinkers must understand their responsibilities have just begun. Here I made an attempt to showcase some of the problems which should be addressed to create value added services to serve our society.