Skip to main content

How to Innovate - Treat Ideas like a ‘Newborn’


I am an 18 month old father (my son was born 18 months ago ), and my life changed completely, for better, after becoming a father. 

Ok, now why do I say ‘better’?  

I get to sleep less, have to alter my plans to take him to the doctor, expenses have gone up, unplanned fun outings have reduced to zero, and I hum ‘wheels on the bus’ while taking bath. But life still feels ‘better’ – holding him in my arms and watching him grow everyday is such a joy! A bit of reading revealed that ‘life is better’ feeling is result of better balanced Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, and Endorphins. (The engineer in me would not just ‘be happy’ and had to find the root cause).

To be truthful, newborns / infants are a lot of work, they are messy, fragile, need lot of TLC, you need a village to ‘raise a child’ and you don’t know how they will turn out. But they have possibilities and potential! 

Innovative ideas are the same – they are messy, fragile, they keep you up at night, need lot of TLC, you need a village to ‘pursue an innovative idea, and you don’t know how they will turn out. But they also have possibilities and potential! 

Similar to a newborn, ‘Innovative ideas’ need a nurturing environment. They need to be taken care of, disruption they may cause to ‘set life’ of an Organization needs to be treated kindly, failures of ideas need to be looked at as ‘learning opportunities’ and it needs a ‘village’ to raise innovative ideas (everyone from the organization who can contribute, in their own little ways, even when the idea may not be theirs).

Why would an Organization go through all this with no ‘ROI’ guarantee? Because ‘Innovative Ideas’ open   Possibilities and have Potential to make an Organization better, better at everything! 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to go from ‘thought’ to ‘reality - Be comfortable with your ‘naivety’

Most of the times ideas that you have will fall outside of your comfort area and ‘day job skills’. You may be thinking about ‘transplanting’ what you have learned in one area and trying to apply the same in a different area. After the initial excitement, you will realize that you know very little about the other area in which you are venturing. Instead of fearing such situation, you should be ‘comfortably excited’. Here are 2 reasons why: You will have an opportunity to learn about this new area. Not knowing all details about this new area is an advantage, and not a handicap. This naivety allows you to not be bounded by assumptions that people with thorough knowledge and experience of this area have. This allows you to bring in a new perspective. Take ideas, data, experience and inspiration from your current experience to the new area. For more such lessons,  click here.
Post a Comment
Read more

How to innovate - Skate where the puck is going

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be” – Wayne Gretzky This cliché quote from Gretzky has been so overused that people have stopped paying attention to anything that follows it. So why do I bring up this quote in the context of Innovation? I bring it up to highlight that most people using this quote do not talk about difficulty involved in, and practice and patience needed to anticipate where puck is going. So I want to recognize that anticipating where proverbial puck is going is not easy. It requires physical and mental conditioning, developing specific skills and lot of practice. It also requires being comfortable with going to a place where the puck does not arrive. If we want to innovate, we need to get comfortable with not finding the puck where we anticipated it to go. And keep ‘pivoting’ till we become good at reaching as close to puck as we can. Same is the case with Innovation – it is not eas...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are you an Innovator?

'Why I am asking this?'. As someone who 'thinks' he is an innovator, I often find my self alone when I want to share my ideas, discuss solutions, get feedback and get a different perspective. This question is an attempt to seek out others who may also find themselves in similar situation. I would love to form a group of such people to collaborate for our mutual benefit. "When in doubt, ask Wikipedia": This principle has stood me well whenever I find myself short on information about something or when I cannot express something concisely and clearly. Wikipedia has never disappointed me and has often left me in utter dis-belief that it is 'crowd sourced' and not 'institutionally curated' information.     Here is what Wikipedia says about an Innovator:             An innovator in a general sense, is a person or an organization who is one of the first to introduce into reality  something bett...
Post a Comment
Read more