– It’s why 4 out of 10 companies now have Chief Innovation Officers and some pay Innovation consultants tens of thousands of dollars to work their magic. Innovative work is certainly the more glamorous type, but it’s only one part of any successful plan.
Routine tasks are routine because they’ve proven themselves valuable, but if a company wants long-term success, routine work won’t cut it and won’t keep it competitive. If business X comes up with a great new engine, business Y’s fine-tuned process for building the current status quo engine will be obsolete. This is where innovation comes in – and why those consultants make such big bucks.
Unlike routine work, innovation is unpredictable, but the likelihood of it happening certainly doesn’t need to be left to chance. Innovations are most likely to emerge when people are always busy experimenting with new ideas or building upon existing ones. It all boils down to consistency and volume. Take Mozart and Picasso, for example: they may have made it into the canon with a few masterpieces, but what’s not so often acknowledged is that these geniuses produced just as many – if not more – banal or bad pieces of work.
If you want your team to innovate, don’t evaluate them as you would someone doing routine work. Your experiments might produce a lot of stuff that isn’t usable, and it’s often hard to predict when exactly they will come up with their first great idea. And remember: they might not always look productive on their way to that stroke of genius. After all, how productive would Archimedes have looked in the bathtub just before his famous “eureka” moment?
Caitlin works on the podcast and copy at Blinkist. She’s been writing for digital – agency side and freelance – for more than a decade. Caitlin studied English and Spanish literature and has lived in a handful of countries, where she’s eaten all the delicious things and picked up odd lexical delights.\nCaitlin’s recommended read is \nJust Listen\n by Mark Goulston
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