“What is Innovation?”
This article explores The Innovation Garage definition of innovation by presenting some common baseline terms with intent to better understand what is necessary for a strong innovation and growth mindset program within your organization.
What Is Innovation? – Understanding at a deeper level.
To truly grasp what is innovation, we must explore its various dimensions and applications within organizations.
Since 2012, The Innovation Garage has been working with 100+ organizations on various strategy, innovation and supply chain transformation programs. Spending significant time with organizations across many diverse industries commercializing product, processes and services that never existed before. Each organization we collaborate with has a unique culture, mindset and organizational dynamics.
That being the case, we think there are strong foundational elements backed up by real world case stories from our client experiences that are a helpful guide for other organizations wanting to paint their own picture of what a successful innovation deployment should look like and feel like.
When thinking of innovation, most people will naturally make a direct link to the latest new technology product or service. When asking in client innovation programs to share insights on the question “What is Innovation?”, common answers align to the latest new technology. A current example all the rage at the moment is Artificial Intelligence with publicly available AI tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, Google Gemini or X’s Grok AI.
One thing is for certain, if you want to expand your innovation capabilities within your organization or team, it is highly encouraged to have a broad definition of the term innovation. The reality is that innovation can present itself in many forms. Thinking about innovation and its application to your organization’s product, processes or services makes a ton of sense to do.
Innovation can apply to most all areas of any organization, small, mid market, non-profit, government entity, regardless of an organization’s structure or tax classification.
- Innovation can provide value by applying to products, processes or services. Both new and existing.
- Innovation can provide value by reducing time or making something more efficient.
- Innovation can provide value by solving small and simple problems that occur frequently.
- Innovation can provide value by solving large and complex problems that occur occasionally.
- Innovation can provide value by driving revenue to new heights.
- Innovation can provide value by making an organization operate more efficiently.
The Innovation Garage offers the following definition in response to the question, “What is Innovation?”
Innovation is creative thinking and execution that provides value to others.” – The Innovation Garage
Value can best be described as the higher order benefit of the product, process or service offering for others. Consider what the benefit of the offering will be for your end customers. Then by working backwards, the team works towards designing and delivering the ideal user experience of the offering. Working backwards from the high-level value delivery sets an ideal strategic vision for the product, process or service offering.
What is Innovation? – Balancing tension between creativity and execution.
Spending too much time focusing solely on creativity and ideation by creating ideas alone? That’s all you’ll have in the end state. A long list of ideas that most likely will never be actioned.
Focusing the team solely on execution for an extended time without creativity and problem solving infused in the process? The end result will be that your pipeline will become stale and may drift into a continuous and energy draining doom loop of perpetual efficiency and cost reduction projects.
Balancing the natural tension between creativity and execution requires a guided process with simple frameworks to do innovation well. There is a need for both high levels of creative and critical thinking, gamification, and very strong execution skills as part of the ideal innovation process. Strong innovation programs recognize this tension and will manage the tension in a productive and positive way.
If the innovation process could be reduced to one descriptive adjective, we would choose the term “craftsmanship” as the ideal descriptor. It takes a ton of skill, patience, craftsmanship and execution to pull off the process most effectively.
In the best and most transformative deployments, innovation requires an ideal blend of craftsmanship using analog methods and blending the right amount of people, process and technology as the amplifier.
What is Innovation? – What are some ideal program elements?
An ideal checklist of the elements to blend in includes the following:
- Understanding individual team member thinking styles and strengths.
- Nurturing individual and organization mindsets to loose fear of failure by trusting themselves and their instincts.
- Identifying both new opportunities or existing problems to solve.
- Introducing the right level of creativity, problem solving and critical thinking skills and knowing when to deploy those skills.
- Conducting analog research and insight gathering with various techniques. Then backing up the analog research methods with technology tools, like AI to amplify the research and insight.
- Establishing a process that the team can rely on. Trusting the process to fail forward and lean back on when needed to do so.
- Infusing strong amounts of process discipline and outsider insight from expert process guides to execute effectively.
The ideal blend and balance of the above elements is the key to success in answering the question “What is innovation?”
“What is Innovation?” – What is needed for my organization?
One of the ideal and simple ways to find your organization’s answer to the question is to train up willing participants and experiment with the process.
The Innovation Garage offers three (3) levels of Innovation and Growth Mindset education for client teams that are willing to begin the journey.
If you’d like to learn more about The Innovation Garage Innovation and Growth Mindset program offerings and how we will support your organization to get there, take a first step by reaching out to us.
At The Innovation Garage®, We help organizations grow. Providing education, tools, technology, and expert consulting in change management for strategy, innovation, and supply chain.
Guiding leaders from organizations across the world to intentionally self-disrupt their offerings and organizations. We deliver world-class education, tools, and technology on how to craft business operating systems focused on long-term profitable growth.