6 Keys to Supercharging Innovation

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination"

- Albert Einstein

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Innovation is often the lifeblood of a company, yet most organizations don’t even try to foster innovation outside of new product development and even then they often struggle. This article will walk you through the simple yet amazingly effective process for supercharging innovation in your company.

Ed Catmull, the head of Disney Animation Studios and Pixar said “Creativity is just the fundamental hard work of problem solving”. The problem is, we don’t clearly understand the process for innovative problem solving. Here is a performance accelerator to help get you started.

If you haven’t already read my article on decision making, begin there to set the context and learn another about another strong performance accelerator.

Powerful innovation and decision making are actually a subset of a management practice called “The Thinking Wavelength”, which begins with fundamentally sound decisions and spans to the pinnacle of pure innovation and transformative thought leadership.

So how do we jumpstart the innovation capability in our organization?

Let’s walk through the fundamental process of innovative problem solving. Paradigm shifts and transformation are obviously lifetime practices but let’s begin with the fundamental performance accelerators for this discipline.

Innovation Performance Accelerator

1. Get Perspective

• Innovation is usually the result of getting multiple perspectives, from multiple disciplines and multiple points of view. Most importantly, it is the process of not selecting the first option until a reasonable number of alternatives have been evaluated.

• Begin by writing down your most innovative idea every day for 30 days.

2. Gather all your ideas

• At the end of the 30 days, pick the best idea.

• By the way, this is not for the product team or the innovation team, every team in the company should have innovation and continuous learning as a prime directive.

3. Decide where to focus

• Use the decision making process to decide if your idea is good

4. Build on a foundation of best practices

• Innovation is important but building on a foundation of industry best practices is essential if they don’t already exist in your company.

• Challenge your team to make a simple presentation of the 10 most important best practices in their discipline

5. Collaborate to create a catalyst

• Challenge your direct reports to refine one system in a collaborative working session (1 day)

6. Start the momentum by taking the first step

• Challenge each of your direct reports to implement one substantial improvement