According to Professor Benoit Godin and the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, innovation has been given many different meanings throughout history. For an extended period, the word had a powerfully negative connotation. It was the secularised term for heresy.
Quite understandable. The word itself comes from Latin, meaning to "renew, bring in new things, alter established practices." Something that may have been perceived as a threat by the establishment or whoever had power.
People began to use the word innovation for creative advances only after World War II, giving back to the term a positive meaning.
However, lately, innovation has become more of a buzzword. And too often, it is seen as a way to protect and preserve the status quo - often called competitive advantage - more than transforming it.
That's why, a few years back, during a friendly conversation on a hill full of olive trees, my co-author and I felt that we needed to innovate innovation. I didn’t know at that time, but we were starting a heresy.
Subtraction: The Subtle Art of Unleashing Boundless Innovation is a heretic book. It contains at least two significant heresies.
The first one is that boundless innovation is mystical in nature. It is an offspring of the union of the human and the Divine. Mysticism is not an esoteric or religious concept. It is the practice of accessing all the dimensions of the self and expressing them. It is how we expand our awareness, fusing all intelligences into a higher form of wholistic intelligence.
The second heresy is that to maximize the impact of our innovations, we need to embrace a process of subtraction. Subtraction allows us to remove everything that holds us back from our immense creative potential.