Innovation Can Be The Art of Recycling Ideas!!! – by Rodrigo B. Ferreira

Contrary to the common sense, the value of innovation may simply lie in the ability to improve on existing ideas. This post will discuss how innovation takes place in organizations and which mental paradigms still need to be broken.

The book The Innovator’s DNA explains that innovation skills have less to do with genetic gifts than to do with learnable discovery skills.
Interestingly, these skills (questioning, observing, networking, experimenting and associating) usually develop from the existing concepts in the minds of the individuals.
Innovators seem to improve or change concepts creating benefits that people value.

On the blog post titled Innovation Doesn’t Matter we read:

“The iPad wasn’t even the first tablet computer.”

 “Facebook wasn’t the first social network. Google wasn’t the first search engine. And Apple has invented nothing of breakthrough significance in its own right ever.”

“ […] a business that is very good at iterating on other’s genius will likely win you the title of innovator anyway.”

Generally, the innovative people or companies take ideas and use them as raw material for their innovation process through the discovery skills mentioned above, whether they are aware of such process or not.

From the blog post titled How process leads to the idea:

“Whether you are innovating with new products and services, tapping new technologies or shifting a brand and its image, corporate change and transformation of your business model is hard enough to manage if you have no model for managing the operations to support those innovations.”

Ideas are out there to be observed, used, tweaked, improved, associated, and this makes me wonder if the companies that secretly develop new product through research and development (R&D) are missing the external feedback. Obviously, there is a tradeoff between R&D and speed to market.

On the blog post For Successful Innovation, Sell Imperfect Products we read:

“Rather than making big upfront research and development investments in new ideas, these companies instead start with an MVP, or minimum viable product, […]  The concept behind the MVP is to find the fastest, most cost-effective way to build a salable product that delivers on your basic idea and induces a reaction from prospective buyers.”

 “Lowering product development costs is an important benefit of early market testing. Since more than 90 percent of new products fail the first time they’re launched, smart companies have discovered they can improve their success rate simply by testing an early version.”

Well, it sounds to me as if innovation and creativity are more similar to process improvement than to really having an idea and inventing the next big thing.

The reality is that companies should understand and focus on this iteration process, which is unique and generates great innovations!