It’s Never Too Late For Innovation Resolutions
2 May, 2018 / Articles
It’s almost May and despite all your good intentions to change your innovation habits, you have little to show for it. What we recently referred to as the “new year” is almost half-way done and you are no more innovative this year than last. Year in and year out, that is the story of so many of our lives, mine included.
Sound familiar? Of course! We’re all busy and change takes time and energy; habits are hard to break. But, we still have the better part of the year to go in 2018, and there is abundant time to start experimenting with new behaviors. So, in the spirit of “perpetual reinvention,” now is as good a time as any to re-start. There is no reason that innovation resolutions should only be made on an annual basis.
Here are a set of innovation resolutions that complement those originally posted at the end of last year, originating from among a set of thoughtful innovation practitioners. What strikes me as being particularly noteworthy about these is that they offer suggestions that can be adopted by us all: practicing extreme empathy with respect to our innovation clients, being more precise regarding anticipated innovation impact before and after an engagement, bringing new partners into the innovative activity and experimenting with the rules and roles of that partnership, being more thoughtful about execution as well as ideation and in how we balance our attention portfolios between content creation and delivery. All in all, what they offer is not so much rocket-science as practical ways for changing behaviors to unleash energy to get us moving.
Cultivate extreme empathy: devote significant time to observing surroundings and pay attention to emotions. Make every frustration a learning experience; how would you redesign this product, this service? Make every waiting time an observatory; why is this person behaving this way? Why did she choose this color of socks or why does she puts her phone facing downward on the table? Take nothing for granted, question everything, explore every angle.”
Alex Osterwalder, listed by @Thinkers50 Founder Strategyzer.com, co-author of Business Model Generation & Value Proposition Design; @AlexOsterwalder.
In 2018 my team and I at Strategyzer aim to measure innovation and returns more rigorously! This consists of measuring how much we can prove that an idea is a good one (evidence), at what cost (experiments), and with which potential results (profitability).”
Abhijit Bhaduri, author of The Digital Tsunami; bestselling novelist, cartoonist and talent management advisor to organizations; social media commentator and blogger on digital transformation; creator of sketch accompanying this post; @AbhijitBhaduri.
It is time to create new models of learning and leadership for a world where exponential technology is shaping how we work. Bringing an interdisciplinary lens to explore new models of leadership learning is my innovation resolution.
Using the lens of performing arts will help me look at leadership behavior with a fresh perspective, I will collaborate with a National Award winning actor from Bollywood – Ashish Vidyarthi to create an offering called Leadership Theater, based on working with “new teams assembled based on the specific needs of that moment and with a limited financial commitment.”
Tim Kastelle, teacher of innovation management at the University of Queensland Business School; @TimKastelle.
In his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, ‘To achieve creativity in an existing domain, there must be surplus attention available.’ I’ve been very much in delivery-mode over the past couple of years, but now I need to get back into thinking more creatively for a while. And, that surplus attention issue is a big one. So, I’m resolving to pay more attention to how I allocate my attention, making sure that I make space for creative work.”
The science man and innovator, Fernando Fischmann, founder of Crystal Lagoons, recommends this article.
