One Apple A Day #122
Innovation, creativity, ideas. I have been spinning my mind around these subject a lot lately. What is innovation? How do we become more creative? How can we generate more ideas in an organisation? How can we unleash the creative power of a person or a team? Is there a way or method to become more creative? A trick to generate more ideas? And how do you measure the value of an idea? How can we understand if the result of our innovation work is valuable or pointless?
Being a conceptual topic, everyone has his own take on this. I don’t have one yet. I’m still searching, asking, reading, discussing. I find the topic fascinating. Our society is built on innovation, and somehow innovation is the human version of nature’s evolution. With this analogy in mind, I started reflecting about the way evolution works. The first thing that struck me is that there is a lot of casualty in evolution. Nature is not obsessed with the outcome of a single change as we are. Nature plays on the long term, so she (for the sake of this post I decided that nature is a “she”) tries and observed. Some things work out well other go forgotten. As humans, we put a lot more focus on the outcome. We innovate to generate new value or new sources of value. And this value must be measurable, understandable. We struggle to think in the very long term so we must be able to perceive the value in what we do. What would happen to our capacity to innovate if, some times, we accept the idea of not knowing the outcomes at all? The second thing is that every evolution does not come out of nothing, but it’s a change started from what exists. I believe that creativity and innovation are the results of the expansion of our awareness. Both the awareness of ourselves and of the world that surrounds us. This awareness allows us to see new connections. To spot the gaps between things. To see the cracks in the wall through which we can have a glimpse of new opportunities. To become more creative we must improve our listening and observation skills.