My Perspective on Innovation

Innovation.  It's one of those funny words like strategy that loses meaning everyday through misuse and misunderstanding.  I have a simple definition for innovation, which is "doing something different".  What's that you say "doing something different" doesn't mean you're doing something innovative?  That may be true, however, I'm of the mind that practical innovation or innovations that can actually be used or commercialized are most important.  I lead technology innovation a leading pharmaceutical company and had some great successes most of them are active products in the market place.  However, before those success there was plenty of learning to be had.  There's this concept of "act fast, fail early", I agree that it has some merit, but it's not a concept I'd write about.  The issue with this concept is that you are cheating yourself out of rich, deep learning experiences.  This is something IDEO will never experience because they never move a product through execution, into manufacturing and through lifecycle planning.  If you want to create sustainable products through innovation (e.g., rapid prototyping, hueristic research, etc.) you need to understand your market to the level of nausia.  Regulations, laws, policies, scientific discovery all have the ability to determine the fate of product.

My motto is "innovation through demostration", so to the point above I obviously understand to value of prototyping quickly to vet a product.  I use this method to influence senior leaders within my organization to invest in my ideas and direction for the organization.  This is no small feet working at second largest Pharma company by revenue in the world.  In my opinion this strategy works because people are generally not creative in their day to day working roles (unless your incented to do so).  There's a distinct difference between pitching and idea with a deck versus with a working prototype.  I attest that this method not only works, but is repeatable.

This is one of my first demostrable innovation experiments...