A Quote by Ben Horowitz
The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
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Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.
The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.
It's the unlikely juxtaposition of creativity and logic which causes the wooliness and confusion around the term 'innovation'. Everybody wants to be innovative; many companies and ideas are proclaimed to be innovative and no one doubts that innovation is a money spinner. And, thus, we are all looking for the magic formula. Well, here you go: Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation.
If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.
Creativity is the generation and initial development of new, useful ideas. Innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas in an organization. Thus, no innovation is possible without the creative processes that mark the front end of the process: identifying important problems and opportunities, gathering relevant information, generating new ideas, and exploring the validity of those ideas.
The paradox of innovation is this: CEO's often complain about lack of innovation, while workers often say leaders are hostile to new ideas.
Why is it that, when we want to think outside the proverbial box, we often put ourselves in one? We gather our team in a conference room, plaster the walls with sticky paper, and wait for the ideas to flow in a stream of marker scribbles. How often has your quest for innovation peaked at renovation - new dressing on old ideas?
Most people believe a new idea must be fully baked and ready-for-primetime. That is like saying a newborn child should have a college degree and be self-sustaining on day one. Like children, new ideas need to be nurtured, shaped, and protected. People often hold back ideas since they are not ready to defend sharp criticism. Companies that celebrate "creative sparks" and reserve judgment while ideas mature are the ones that enjoy significantly more creativity and innovation.
Cultivating innovative thinking starts at the top. Leaders can foster a culture of innovation by encouraging creativity and experimenting with new ideas.
Because the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation.
Scholars are deeply gratified when their ideas catch on. And they are even more gratified when their ideas make a difference - improving motivation, innovation, or productivity, for example. But popularity has a price: people sometimes distort ideas and, therefore, fail to reap their benefits.
I'm proposing to you that photography is a language on its own, which is that when you look at images you do derive ideas; and I'm also proposing to you that you can derive ideas without going through words. So I'm forcing you to really look. And this process of looking, it's like a new set of ideas that are being proposed to you.
There's no such thing as good ideas and bad ideas. There are only your own ideas and other people's. If you want someone to like your idea, tell him he said it first last week and you just remembered it.
Often the ideas in the show start out as ideas that make you laugh - outrageous "what if" ideas. I wanted an outlet for doing those.
While leaders spend considerable time and effort trying to envision markets and pushing out innovation, empathy can often generate simple, yet breakthrough ideas.
Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.
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