Innovation part 1: Doing what no one else is doing.

Apple used to have a slogan that, while grammatically incorrect, made me feel understood. It simply said, “Think different.” My wife refers to it as my “random access memory”. I often wonder if something isn’t quite right with me because I never tend to process things like everyone else.

I tend to think about things others aren’t. I notice things others don’t. And I’m always associating or connecting things together in ways others wouldn’t. If I were still in junior high this might make sense, but I’m past that stage, at least for the most part. I was recently reassured that someone understands me as I read an article in the Harvard Business Review over the Christmas holidays.

According to an article entitled “The Innovator’s DNA” I have the makings or “DNA” common to innovators. Simply put, I enjoy and am obsessed with collecting things and linking them together to make new things. The authors Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen identify five skills common to innovators.

1. “ASSOCIATING helps innovators discover new directions by making connections among seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas.
2. QUESTIONING allows innovators to break out of the status quo and consider new ideas.
3. Through OBSERVING, innovators carefully and consistently look out for small behavioral details (in the activities of customers, suppliers and other companies) to gain insights about new ways of doing things.
4. In EXPERIMENTING, they relentlessly try on new experiences and explore the world.
5. And through NETWORKING with diverse individuals from an array of backgrounds, they gain radically new perspectives.”
-Source: The Innovator’s DNA, J.H. Dyer, H.B. Gregersen and C.M. Christensen, HBR, Dec. 2009, p. 128

We need innovation if we want to make a difference in the world for Jesus’ sake. Simply doing what we’ve been doing with the people we’ve been connecting with won’t give us significantly different results than we’ve been seeing. The only way we’re going to reach people no one is reaching is through innovation; to be doing what no one else is doing. (Listen to a great podcast on this by clicking on this link.)

I’m going to be exploring each of these skills separately in the next few posts and would love to get your feedback, stories, observations as I go along. Send me a message or leave a comment. I love collecting new ideas…