Hurry! Do it!

Innovate! Do it now! Why aren’t you more innovative!

I’m tired, that’s why. Why don’t you innovate?

It’s your job! Do it! Hurry!

I don’t know how – can you tell me how?

No.

Those kinds of conversations although completely imagined by me give an idea of the kind of pressure I’m feeling to do this thing. So that led me to think about a definition of innovation so I looked it up and you know what it said “something new or different introduced.” What? I do that every freaking day. Ben Cameron, in a recent speech, gave a definition that made sense to me “Innovation equals pathways to value delivery that are discontinuous. Innovation is not a new way to do an old thing, innovation is something that changes organizational assumptions.” But first you have to know what your organizational assumptions are.

I wish we could all put aside two things – that is a certain amount of time to spend each week on innovation and some money to put towards innovation – like a certain percentage of our budgets just so we could try something out if we had a good idea. How many times a month/week/day do you say – oh that’s a good idea…if only we had the dough. What if we put aside that dough for risk capital, built it into the budget and held onto it through all the cuts we have to make. What if we held onto that time every week to think and dream. Maybe we could figure out how to change our organizational assumptions and truly innovate. Just the doing of it would be innovative.

So, now go forth and innovate.

Deb