Believe it or not this post actually consists of more than just jamming as many trendy tech buzz words into a single title as physically possible. It is about “Innovation”.
Every year seems to have its emerging, recurring themes. So far this year’s emergent theme has been “Innovation” in my world. Everyone and their mother seems to be talking about innovation and/or wants to foster innovation at their organization in the tech world.
This theme has got me thinking lately. What exactly is “innovation”?
I spent about an hour reading through the most popular dictionary sites, blogs, thought leaders, to see how they define innovation. The best definition I found was actually on wikipedia:
Innovation is a new way of doing something or “new stuff that is made useful”. It may refer to incremental and emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations
In my experience innovation does not apply to specific technologies or processes or people per se. It consists of a fundamental shift in thinking across all of these things.
In order to truly innovate, or be innovative, it requires an organization (which is really just a big group of people) to seriously look long and hard at how they do things looking for better ways. They need to be willing to think differently and look at how they operate differently. Yes, this typically leads to new, better, processes and technologies 9 times out of 10 but it doesn’t HAVE to.
One of my favorite movie scenes of all time is from Dead Poets Society. In the scene Robin Williams the “Rebel” (innovative?) teacher at the stuffy prep school is trying to teach his class about how to think creatively (innovate?) and he states that sometimes you literally have to look at the same situation or same problem in a new way. To demonstrate this he has every student come up to the front of the class and stare back at the same class they have been in for years. However, this time they are to look at the class while standing on the desk in the front of the room. Same class, same people, same course – different vantage point.
This is how you foster innovation. You force the people that make up your organization to see things differently and come up with new, better ways of accomplishing existing goals or solving existing problems.
Amazon is in the business of selling books. Apple is in the business of selling hardware (consumer electronics to be exact). The iPad is just a new distribution media for Amazon to sell books – just like the Kindle was. 
