Innovation is Continuous
Have you been thrown into the “innovation gauntlet” yet at your place of work? You will. Companies have to continually innovate and create new products, processes, and procedures to make things better. If you think that going to a creative training program where the concepts of innovation are taught by your company and you’ll be done with innovation, you’ll most likely be wrong.
Becoming an innovative employee is a critical career skill for you to both learn and implement.
In our series on Innovation - Five Ways to Pimp Your Creativity, we provided a high level view of what innovation and creativity encompass. In Innovation is Small, the first component of pimping your creativity, we’ve done a quick look at the principle of innovating that which we can control and influence. We’re not changing the world, we’re fixing this process causing us problems.
The need for innovation has been covered in other posts; in this view, we’ll see why innovation needs to be continuous. It’s really pretty simple:
Continuous innovation yields big results. While we can’t change the world through what we do for innovation, making a continuous effort at improving what we can control and influence will make a big difference. If you were to continuously improve one process (or relationship) over the course of a year, for example, it will be significantly different from when you started. Even one little innovation a month can yield big changes in the course of a year.
Continuous innovation means faster learning. If you were to make one change a year in a process, you wouldn’t learn very much about the change. If you were to make a change every two weeks in a process, you’d learn a lot.
Continuous innovation requires measurements. This is my favorite. How do you know something is getting better? You have to define some success criteria and be able to measure what your innovative change is doing against the measurements. Continuously innovating will get you hopelessly lost determining success without the measurements in place.
Continuous innovation is strategy. I’m not a fan of the strategy word, but it applies here. By having to continuously innovate, it requires you to not only do the business, but think about how you are doing the business. Thinking about how you do the work in order to make the work better is strategy, even if it about a single process and not the “next big thing.”
Continuous innovation builds a success culture. Think about this. If you are always innovating, you are always implementing something that will succeed or fail quickly. As a result, you will learn what works and what doesn’t as you go. Constantly accomplishing something while continuously testing the work environment builds your confidence.
The challenge for us is to set up our own environment so that we can continuously innovate in a way that can be tracked, examined, and changed while keeping all of us working on the same sheet of music. It’s not easy - but innovation is worth it.
Tags: Cube life, Survival SkillsRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Cube life, General work pimps, Survival Skills
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