Innovation Tip: Love their children as your own!

Making innovations happen is child's play! 

If you genuinely believe so, this post is perhaps not for you! Moreover, I would love to hear from you how you are so successful at innovation. Really.

However, if you are like most people, you not only believe but have also experienced that implementing innovation is a bitter sweet journey. Perhaps more bitter than sweet, punctuated more by ducks than by sixes, by ouchs than by hurrahs. However, you do believe that despite everything, there is merit in persevering with your innovation expedition.

How do we make this journey smoother? More importantly, how do we increase our chances of successful delivery, after enduring this labour of ideas?

In an earlier post, I pointed out that one piece of the innovation puzzle is loving your ideas enough to let them go. To let them be owned and adopted by others. 

Let us now get to the other side of this coin. 

Other People's Children

Wish the world listened to Truman! Unfortunately, there are many out there who do not just want credit. They would even kill for it! Maybe not you, but your ideas, and in the process you! 

There are others who may not care about getting the credit. But they may also not care about organizational improvement either. Or they may, but only in their own small sphere of operation. They don't have time or inclination to invest any attention or energy in your idea.

In both cases above, your idea is foreign to them. It is not their baby, and hence they either actively resent it or are indifferent to it.

Don't be like them! 

Love Their Babies

Be kind, fair and just. Be open to ideas from anyone and everyone. Give others' ideas the same regard and respect as you would, to your own ideas. They deserve it, you deserve it, the ideas deserve it.

Stretch your Arms

Be alert, ever welcoming and ever open! You never know when, from whom and how a beautiful idea may come flying to you! Great ideas can come from the most unlikeliest of places - including the most familiar ones! 

Reach out

No, don't just be open! Go out, actively reach out to others, seek help and ideas from others - from both experts and those who you think are not experts, from those both within and outside your organization and even industry. You will come back wiser, humbler and more innovative!

Run Eureka with Their Idea

Tomorrow's innovation leader would run out naked telling the world of his/her colleague's idea, praising the colleague who may still be in the bathtub!

Celebrate ideas! Irrespective of their parenthood. 

Practise this regularly, make nurturing ideas a part of your nature. This will attract more people to come up to you with their ideas. And it will help you a lot in grooming yourself as a master innovator, as you get a steady flow of ideas from outside! 

Bring Them Up

Remember that few babies are born perfect and fully developed, in every way. As an aspiring innovator, you should cultivate the willingness, enthusiasm and wisdom to build upon the ideas of your collaborators as well as others. You need to be able to not only adopt great ideas, but to also identify promising ideas of others and develop them into great ones. 

Let Them Be

You may have helped grow their children; they may even have died without you. But take it easy, don't worry about the credit. Share it generously. Just be grateful that you got the golden opportunity to play your part in growing their ideas; the ideas already carry your imprint. They themselves are your reward. Anything more is an extra gift!

These are my humble viewpoints on how one can be a better innovator! What do you think? Do they make sense? Do you agree? Do you have something else to add? 

Please feel free to add in the comments below. And please do share this post on social media, assuming you liked it! Thank you very much.

Postscript: Confessions

I realize that while I have been very welcoming towards others' ideas, I have often not battled enough to take their ideas forward (I am not able to battle enough for my ideas either). I think this is something I need to fix; who knows, if I battle more for others' children than I do for my own, I might have to battle less for my own, as others may fend for them! And that gives hope - for me, and hopefully for you too!

Culture and Civilization

- A short essay I wrote in 2007, reproducing here

Isaac Newton once said,"We stand on the shoulders of giants". Yes, humanity has progressed over the ages by building on the contribution of our forefathers. The struggles, aspirations, successes and failures of our ancestors have shaped our collective conscience and our identity. This wealth of inheritance that is constantly evolving, we identify as our culture.

Thus we can speak of a global culture as the synthesis of some overarching beliefs, ideas and yearnings that at once characterize both the human race and each individual. These apparently unifying attributes can be considered to be the definitional constructs of a human being or organism.

However these macrocosmic characteristics notwithstanding, there exist multiple identities and hence multiple cultures. This is due to the enormous diversity of the human race. Thus we have national cultures and regional cultures where culture derives its identity from commonality of geography. One could also think of religious cultures which cut across geographies. We also frequently hear of the culture of the rich and the elite, the culture of the poor and downtrodden, tribal culture and even political and bureaucratic cultures.

Seen in this light, every society can be considered both as an amalgamation of different cultures and also as having one culture, when the unifying factor that defines the society is used to define the culture as well. Even every individual owes his allegiance to multiple cultures; it is just that one of these supersedes the others in any given situation.

So inherently diverse as every society is, the growth of a society depends critically on the interplay of these different cultures and identities cherished implicitly or explicitly by each individual. When the unifying ethos of the society is strong and appealing enough to be embraced by a large majority, society thrives - it has the potential to weather many a crisis. When this near-Utopian state - wherein differences are respected, inequality is low and wherein inherent heterogeneity(not homogeneity) becomes a unifying force in itself, thereby dispelling or reducing artificial heterogeneity - is attained, a society is said to be civilized.

Hence civilization is inextricably linked with the social and economic well-being of the people. A civilized society is one in which the people are prosperous, human values are respected and social and technological advancements exist to sustain that state.

There have been some great civilizations in the past like those of Egypt, Indus-Valley and Mesopotamia. However most of them fell prey to man's greed - his desire to conquer and acquire. The clash between civilizations that originated then exists even today and dominates the arena of global politics. The alarming disparities in the distribution of wealth over the ages have resulted in a huge socio-economic divide between the haves and the have-nots. Even in the USA - one of the most developed countries of the world - the disparity between the rich majority and the poor minority is very huge.

Therefore, civilization as we understand it, probably exists only in history textbooks. However there is room for hope. Many of the so-called 'emerging economies' like India and China are really on an upward growth spiral. This has inspired and enabled many people to take up philanthropic activities. Let us hope that we are able to lead and participate in a revolution that could eventually result in a rebirth of civilizations. We would do well to remember the words of the Father of our Nation, "We have enough on this planet for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed".

Innovation Tip: Love them enough to Let them Go!

The Pain of Being an Idea Person

So you come up with a brilliant idea! You believe in it. You are confident that if taken forward, if implemented, it can bring positive change to your organization. 

But alas! You need the support or sponsorship of someone else - maybe higher up in the hierarchy - to implement it. You propose it - passionately, eloquently, convincingly. You make a proposal you think they cannot refuse. 

However, to your surprise, they dispose of your proposal, by throwing it into the intellectual dustbin, by burying it deep in the organizational cemetery of ideas.

You may discover later that someone else somewhere else implements your idea and brings significant transformation to perhaps not just their organization, but also to their industry.

And what you have done? You proposed, they disposed (of your idea, and you!).

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If you have faced some version of this situation, you should listen to me! I have been facing this many times now. I have found that my success rate in coming up with new ideas is pretty good, but alas, my failure rate in implementing them too has also been almost equally high, despite having the support of great team-mates. In at least three cases, the proposals that did not see the light of day in my organization were implemented and launched even on a national scale by none less than...

Let me not boast unforgivably! Let us understand why this happens.

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Other People's Children

Wish the world listened to Truman! Unfortunately, there are many out there who do not just want credit. They would even kill for it! Maybe not you, but your ideas, and in the process you! 

There are others who may not care about getting the credit. But they may also not care about organizational improvement either. Or they may, but only in their own small sphere of operation. They don't have time or inclination to invest any attention or energy in your idea.

In both cases above, your idea is foreign to them. It is not their baby, and hence they either actively resent it or are indifferent to it.

Bring up your Babies!

Your ideas are your babies. Don't just give birth to them and abandon them. Don't just put them in pre-school - i.e., propose them - and hope they will grow and become successful on their own!

Care for them! Nurture them, fight for them, argue for them, give them what they need to grow up and realize their potential. Even if that means fighting honorably against some regressive elements of your organization. 

Let them Go!

Let them adopt your baby! Show them the beauty of your baby and how it is related to them, so that your baby becomes their baby. Show them how your idea is integral to something that they care deeply about. And let them garner a fair share or all of the credit for the idea. Let them feel it is their own. Not easy, but necessary in some cases.

This I think would significantly improve the success of your ideas and innovations - your creations, your children. Especially in an environment that is hostile to new ideas. 

Post Script

Some studies show that people who originate lots of ideas are often lousy in executing them, in bringing them to completion. Yes, it is indeed very unfortunate if you have to fight out to make it happen. Organizations should foster new ideas and innovations, and make it easy for everyone to generate and execute them. Nevertheless, given the reality of most organizations and settings, we need to figure out various ways and techniques to make innovation happen. To let our babies succeed! 

Hope this article provides some value in this direction. Please do feel free to share your thoughts too. And don't forget to share it, if you think this could be of help to someone else too! Thank you!

Passionate about ideas and innovation? You may also like to read:

1. How an Idea Management System can make your organization more innovative
2. How to Implement an Idea Management System