The results are in. Innovating To Win readers tend to be highly active when it comes to innovation. This month’s question was about how often you exercise your innovation muscles. A whopping 79% of you responded that you do so every day!
This is great. Innovation requires a different set of skill and thought paradigms than traditional work tasks. So, practice is very important to ensure that your innovation muscles don’t cramp up on you when you are called upon for a big challenge. The large percentage of every day innovator in this poll is particularly interesting in the light of another poll I am aware of. That poll reached into manufacturing enterprises to study frequency of innovation activity. In that poll, less than 10% of respondents indicated that they felt they performed innovation activities on a daily basis.
Of course, people who read Innovating To Win tend to be among the foremost innovation practitioners, champions and thought leaders. Therefore, the stark contrast in these two polls is not entirely surprising.
However, there are still 21% of us who are not applying our innovation skills on a daily basis. In fact, 4% of us only dust off our innovation tools a couple times a year. This is really not enough.
There are opportunities to create value through innovation every day. For example, consider the typical product lifecycle process.
Innovation doesn’t just participate in the fuzzy front end where opportunity identification and product road mapping occur. Innovation a value generation exercise and such value can be create at all stages--during the conceptual design when new ways of delivering on the product roadmap are discovered, during the detailed design stage where new technology paths can change project dynamics completely, in manufacturing where competitive advantage can be found in novel processes, and in after market when product redesign may be needed.
We all play a role in building the high performance innovation culture. If we who are the champions are not leading by example and demonstrating the value of innovation thinking and practice every day, how can expect other to join our legion?
So, for those of you who are exercising you innovation muscles, huzzah! Now, what will you do get others to adopt your habit?
For those of you who are either innovation weekend warriors or couch potatoes, it’s time to get on the beam and catch up. You can do it!
Once again, your participation in the Innovating To Win innovation poll has provided an interesting picture of the state of innovation. Please remember to vote in the latest poll on the benefit of open innovation.
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