16 August 2010
Successful Intentions Newsletter
Hi ,
If innovation is so easy why isn't everyone doing it?
Coming up with a great idea or a new way of doing things is the easy part. Getting someone to pay attention to it is the hard part! How many wonderful ideas have never made it off the drawing board or failed to attract the support they deserve?
The reason for this has a lot to do with your thinking. Innovators mostly rely on intuitive information processing. But those who make things happen generally use a more rational thinking style. The trick to getting a new idea to market or implementing a new process is to harness both. But how?
Here are the four steps of successful innovation:
- Experiencing: First, someone has to come up with the idea. The innovator gets an insight from the reality around them - intuitively sensing how it could be different. This is a tacit experience felt by the innovator alone.
- Sharing: The next step is sharing that experience with others. The idea must be articulated in more rational terms so others "get" the experience. Words, images and metaphors must be used to help translate the tacit concept into a more explicit, easily understood pattern.
- Systematizing: Next, a balance between rational and intuitive thinking is required to shape the idea into explicit forms that can be disseminated throughout the organisation. The more the idea can be connected with day-to-day challenges, the greater its effectiveness.
- Embodying: Finally, this explicit knowledge must be turned back into some form of daily practice. This means making the idea tacit again, but with a greater awareness of larger and more complex issues. In time, the original idea becomes embodied in the unconscious actions of the organisation or the market - until the next discovery is made through tacit experience, and the innovation cycle continues.
Successful innovation is when the continual dynamic synthesis of tacit experience and explicit knowledge is allowed to proceed.
Want to know more, ? Download the Innovation Process diagram here.
And explore my "Wisdom Circle" blog for musings, research, and applications of practical wisdom!
Keep your intentions clear,
Peter Webb
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