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!