Innovation Takes Time...
"When you plant a seed, you don't dig it up every week to see how its doing" - Unknown
It never ceases to amaze me how impatient corporate executives can be. Of course, most are driven by the need to deliver quarterly results for shareholders and Wall Street analysts. I get it...really I do. But growth cannot be put on such a strict timescale. Growth takes time. Growth is like the seed referenced in the opening quote above. It requires patience, water, food and more patience.
Innovation is the engine for growth. Innovation comes from ideas. Ideas take time to develop. Ideas tend to change as they grow. Ideas need to be prototyped and that takes time. Ideas need to be matched with problems that need solving and that takes time too.
Did you know that most product development lifecycles require 12-24 months from concept to release? When you have executives focused only on the next 3 three months, it can be difficult to get any "airtime." But good executives, the one's who really understand that growth means that their business will be around in 2 or 20 or 200 years, do focus on what interesting things are coming out of the new product/service development cycles.
The trick, and it really isn't a trick, is to have a staggered and constant product development system. If you start everything now, at the same time, you will arrive in the future with everything released around the same time. Let's be honest, you don't really have the resources necessary to start everything at the same time anyway do you? Nope! But what you can do is start some of the work now, then start some more 6 months from now, then even more 6 months from then. See how this works? Staggered, yet constant, delivery of new products/services coming out of the bottom of the development funnel.
Even smarter executives understand that even more patience is required when trying to fill the top of that funnel. Ideas come from deliberate thought about problems. Figuring out which problems to solve requires a lot of brainpower as well. Executives and leaders focused on growth and the future allow for time to envision the future, they walk around to search for problems to solve, they create quiet time for idea incubation, they encourage fast failure via prototyping ideas to see if they will actually work and they provide the most promising ideas with a little seed money.
Time is a precious commodity. Another one of my favorite time-related quotes comes from Harvey MacKay, "Time is free, but priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it, you can never get it back."
Think about that as you look ahead to next year. Are you carving out enough time for ideas and innovation? Are you patient? Are you the person that digs up the seed every week to check on its progress only to discover that it never grows?
It never ceases to amaze me how impatient corporate executives can be. Of course, most are driven by the need to deliver quarterly results for shareholders and Wall Street analysts. I get it...really I do. But growth cannot be put on such a strict timescale. Growth takes time. Growth is like the seed referenced in the opening quote above. It requires patience, water, food and more patience.
Innovation is the engine for growth. Innovation comes from ideas. Ideas take time to develop. Ideas tend to change as they grow. Ideas need to be prototyped and that takes time. Ideas need to be matched with problems that need solving and that takes time too.
Did you know that most product development lifecycles require 12-24 months from concept to release? When you have executives focused only on the next 3 three months, it can be difficult to get any "airtime." But good executives, the one's who really understand that growth means that their business will be around in 2 or 20 or 200 years, do focus on what interesting things are coming out of the new product/service development cycles.
The trick, and it really isn't a trick, is to have a staggered and constant product development system. If you start everything now, at the same time, you will arrive in the future with everything released around the same time. Let's be honest, you don't really have the resources necessary to start everything at the same time anyway do you? Nope! But what you can do is start some of the work now, then start some more 6 months from now, then even more 6 months from then. See how this works? Staggered, yet constant, delivery of new products/services coming out of the bottom of the development funnel.
Even smarter executives understand that even more patience is required when trying to fill the top of that funnel. Ideas come from deliberate thought about problems. Figuring out which problems to solve requires a lot of brainpower as well. Executives and leaders focused on growth and the future allow for time to envision the future, they walk around to search for problems to solve, they create quiet time for idea incubation, they encourage fast failure via prototyping ideas to see if they will actually work and they provide the most promising ideas with a little seed money.
Time is a precious commodity. Another one of my favorite time-related quotes comes from Harvey MacKay, "Time is free, but priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it, you can never get it back."
Think about that as you look ahead to next year. Are you carving out enough time for ideas and innovation? Are you patient? Are you the person that digs up the seed every week to check on its progress only to discover that it never grows?
Time is critical to innovation, however, carving it out is difficult in the hustle and bustle world of corporations. Sometimes using tools to help administer and organize our time thoughts and interactions is critical to achieve an innovation culture.
Idea management software systems tailored for innovation is perhaps one of the great innovation tools of our lifetime. They help gather people into virtual 'invention' rooms to discuss challenges and solutions to these challenges. The back ends of these systems help isolate the best ideas that need to be pursued and also help catalog the lessons learned during the invention and development processes.
There are several major software vendors: Imaginatik, Brainbank Inc, Kindling, Incent Solutions (my company), Hype, JPB, and the list goes on. Everyone has different methodologies but all work great at expediting the innovation process and more importantly, making time for idea development.
George Rathbun
iDS Idea Management Software
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