Ideas Are Not Innovation

Ongoing thoughts about innovation

I have been studying innovation.  Continuous innovation is critical to most businesses, and ours is no exception.  Innovation must be woven into the very fabric of our culture.  Fortunately we have a long history of innovation; we pioneered web self-service, invented and made practical self-learning knowledge bases, were first to market with an integrated eService suite, were first to market with enterprise-class, high security SaaS… the list goes on and on.

In the next few blog entries I am going to share some of my reflections on innovation and how one might instill it into a company culture.  Few things could be more important to long terms success than innovation.

One thing I often see is confusion between “ideas” and “innovations.”  Conversations frequently conclude with something like, “… and that is my idea, what do you think?” Most of the time I respond, “… interesting idea, go see if you can make something of it.”

Here is what Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the GNOME and Mono projects, said:

“Are ideas innovations?  Everyone has ideas.…  For an idea or an innovation to a have a practical effect, they need to go beyond the discussion at the lunch table with your friends and become a reality.”

I couldn’t agree more!  Innovations could be defined as ideas implemented.  Failure of an idea is acceptable (and should be a badge of honor); not acting on a great idea is not acceptable.  Not looking for innovative ideas is laziness. With the ability to innovate comes responsibility; you must undertake to implement your idea.

Remember innovations could be defined as ideas implemented; ideas by themselves are of no effect.

I’ll continue to explore the concept of innovation and share my thoughts regularly.  I’d like to start by understanding, how do you define innovation?