whether you realize it or not, innovation is vitally important to the world we live in. i would argue that it is foundational to this increasingly postmodern world.
and the NECESSITY for INNOVATION will only INCREASE, imho.
Some futurist experts say this about the way our world is changing:
“For the foreseeable future, information will be the business resource, and innovation the work.”
- Clarke & Crossland
now the world is very different. KNOWLEDGE WORK is king (information) and therefore INNOVATION is the skill that is required.
“Innovation is creativity in its working clothes. It has experimentation as a coworker and failure as a strategic partner."
did you catch that? Yes, innovation appears sexy from the outside looking in, but 2 key components to true innovation and creativity are EXPERIMENTATION and FAILURE! are you willing to be an innovator since it means those 2 will be your friends?
and let me be clear what i mean by innovation. Technology doesn’t guarantee innovation. it's just a helper. When i talk about innovation, i'm saying that only the practiced discipline of innovation will produce innovative results.
this is a discipline which requires carving out space to create. it's a discipline that by its very nature requires EXPERIMENTATION and FAILURE!
and if you're afraid of that or think there's another way, i thought this was an awesome "encouragement" from Henry Petroski:
“no one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from success to go beyond the state of the art."
of course, we would like to be innovators without the hard work of EXPERIMENTATION and FAILURES, but it simply isn't possible. we can't experience one without the other.
While failure can be painful, innovative people and organizations EMBRACEthis pain.
simply put by Clarke and Crossland:
simply put by Clarke and Crossland:
“If you want more innovation, allow more experiments.”
