More On Innovation (Article Analysis)

I came upon this article in my twitter today: Marissa Mayer's 9 Priciniples of Innovation

Since my last posting was about innovation I decided to follow up with another innovator's take on innovation. What I liked about this article was a heavy emphasis on how to innovate, innovation best practices, as opposed to Drucker's "Sources of Innovation". My rationale here is a little bit selfish, my employer has tasked each person with the objective of "innovating" on any scale as often as possible. In a vacuum that is certainly well and good but that is like telling people to "win" or "succeed". Sure, these are worthy goals, but they can be esoteric at the same time. Telling someone to "win" does not help them find the way to do so, it merely states the obviously good outcome that they are probably already striving for. Similarly, telling someone to innovate leaves them hanging a bit. Now innovation is obviously different from winning but the vague "do good stuff" without any further concrete guidance can be its own obstacle to that very objective.

The challenge in guiding innovation however is that any effort to steer it may inadvertently limit it, throttle it, or stifle it. So I can appreciate a hands off approach to bringing innovation to fruition, but just like you can not harvest a crop without first tilling the earth, you can not just demand the end product without making the environment conducive to its creation.

Mayer's nine principles lays out, for all intents and purposes the blue print to foster innovation without excessive steerage, that said #3 "A License to Pursue Your Dreams" is probably the best and most conducive to innovation. The 20% time allotted to any productive pursuit allows employees to separate from their day to day and explore. Exploration leads to discovery, experimentation, and innovation. Sometimes the innovation is even fruitful and marketable. I also liked #1 "Innovation, not Perfection" where she warns against building castles. By innovating incrementally things can be accomplished, tested, and finished in non-linear patterns with lots of opportunities to "pivot" as we are discussing this week in our course.

Taking the lessons from these 9 principles helps me personally get into a bit of an innovative mood. Thinking about my organic benchmarking algorithm I can see how I used some of these ideas from my perception of the problem, weak benchmarking, and my envisioned solution, strong benchmarking, and all of the interim steps that got me from perception to delivery. The solution to the problem I had came to me at a Healthcare Business Intelligence Conference in May. I was unplugged, literally since the internet did not work, and the complete separation plus the energy of the conference unlocked the solution that was hiding in my subconscious the entire time.

Bottom Line For Entrepreneurs:
Reading this article should help open up the mind a little and most importantly break us out of linear thought processes. While my previous post argued that entrepreneurism is fundamentally about solving problems, and that innovation is how we figure out how to solve them, this article helps us find the path between perception of the problem, conception of the solution, and delivery of the solution via innovation. Pivoting, collaboration, aggressively probing the box so you can think outside of it, and so are all things that foster innovation, whether it comes in small or large increments, you are still moving forward, even if you have to zig zag.