What’s true innovation?
How the appropriation of this concept by business limits our capacity to innovate.
Business, start-ups, organizations worlds have a fad using some concepts and terms that are extremely useful and ample, but using them to the point of changing them until it becomes an amorphous and recognizable and cringe thing. And without a doubt INNOVATION is a victim of that.
For some decades, I have been researching innovation from the perspective of the natural world as a whole and as human behavior, also I have been around corporations enough time so I can categorically attest: we are brutally shrinking the real meaning of innovation. To the point of losing its true and contemporary meaning, so necessary to our survival as a species.
I currently am in the middle of an innovation process of my own understanding and capacity of innovation, that have a connection of my self-knowledge path. And there are three main reasons:
The first comes from a recent leap of development that I am going through, which has to do with my perception of my senses of responsibility, care and limits. But I am not going to talk further about this today. Maybe in the future, since I still am elaborating this process inside myself.
The second reason comes from the teachings of Professor Thiago Gringon, creator and head of the graduation program in Creativity, Experiences & Communities (former Creativity & Complex Environment), with whom I have the privilege to interact as my boss, co-worker, mentor and friend. As a professor of the same program, I have been inviting myself to learn from the faculty and the students, because this is the only program that brings together some of the most brilliant minds and most loving hearts that I came across.
With this professor, I have learned that innovation is part of creativity, and not the other way around, as I used to think. For me, innovation was the final destination. But according to his perspective, innovation is not even a destination, nonetheless the final one, also because it is not even a linear process. For Gringon, the course of creativity holds imagination, creation and innovation, which are steps that feed themselves through inspiration.
The third reason comes from a content from the brilliant north-American scientist Ayesha Khan, that discuss what limits our creative and innovative capacity. She says:
“We’ve been taught to view the world through a competitive, combative, aggressive, fearful lens when in reality our survival depends on us collaborating, cooperating & aiding each other. We’ve been socialized to think of ourselves as “individuals” in a vacuum rather than part of a collective, inextricably connected & tied to each other. We’ve been told that self-sufficiency, independence & success are markers of a “good person” which also means interdependence, reliance on others & the lack of motivation to succeed are framed as markers of a “bad person”. Participating in these systems may initially lead us to internalize such messaging & make the worst possible assumptions about each other. We’re made to blame ourselves or each other for our inability to thrive in these oppressive, brutal, class-based systems that were not built for any of us. It’s time for us to rethink the entire premise that these systems are built ON.”
It is exactly what I have been encouraging in the classroom, what I have been exchanging with colleagues and clients, these questionings and configurations of what it is to live true innovation.
So let’s go together to make some decompression and gentle expansion of the concept and the practice of innovation?
By my investigations until now, I have come with this humble list of what innovation is not, and I invite you to add and to discuss with your people:
It is not uncommon or extraordinary, unprecedented.
Not even have to be something genius, have to be done by a person that thinks or is pointed by others as someone better or more evolved than the rest.
It is not high tech, not even it is at service to just a part of the population. To this point, if they are not available to everybody to have access when needed or wanted, the innovation process is not yet finished.
It is not a merit of the current economic system, nor a way to surpass the competition, not even the result of discipline or hierarchy. And it does not only happen at groups of power.
It is not have a great idea that is recognized and celebrated by our peers. Or about gaining fame, awards and money.
It does not happen doing it alone and neither only with others. It is not only doing for ourselves and not only doing for others.
It is not limited by circumstances or lack of resources. It does not happen only if we have more, and it isn’t not happening in anyway if we have less. To this point, it is better to rethink why we are focusing so much in having something.
It is not about avoid or reject the suffering of life, otherwise we are going to live all the time in a hyper-vigilance state waiting which is the next suffering that is going to get us, and perceive threat in everything, and follow our days in survival mode.
It is not to accept and resign of life suffering, otherwise we are going to live all the time in a passive state oblivious to anything beneficial that does happen to us and just perceive disasters in everything, and follow our days in survival mode.
The most important of it all: to innovate is not exclusive to human beings, it is a mechanism of nature.
And now, what is making more sense as true innovation?
In the classroom, I have a bigger chance to deepen this concept, also to explore together as a community the path between steps from creation to innovation.
But not to let you craving more, I bring here some important points for us to expand the concept, and have starting points for each person to configure what is going in the direction of our own values and aspirations in life. True innovation invites us to:
• to see beyond our careers and jobs, or the way things are done/going to be done in an organization, even our own desires and our own lives.
• to avoid exploitation and violence, and question the current way of innovate that accepts inequality and the deliberate death of people and cultures, the destruction of the environment, and disinformation as inevitable parts of the process.
• to deal with the fact that is for certain to be stopped and/or limited by the current system in many ways and every step of the way, including after being implemented and even a,ccepted by certain groups.
• to accomplish a community collaboration, respectful of the several ways to function of all involved people, that sustain we are all parts of a natural system that works better that any invention or human control.
• to consider and encourage multiple possibilities co-existing, and to sustain paradoxes.
True innovation lives with the fact that we need to persist in the intention to benefit the most beings we can and to know that our intention/imagination is not enough. If our ego limits our capacity to extent those benefits to other beings, so we have as an only choice to keep referenced in our values and to make the continuous effort to innovate our own selves.
Also, we must identify and recognize the ripple effect that our creations trigger, and remember that we don’t have control of the consequences of our innovations, neither of other people, or even of ourselves.
True innovation considers the impact of all steps of the creative process in perpetuity, at the same time that ask us to detaches ourselves from try to have the power to control how those ripples are going to reverberate in the world.
In the end, true innovation is the one which we realize that there is no most important creation to accomplish in life than of ourselves and what resonates from our actions and non-actions.
But differently from self-improvement and self-promotion culture, to innovate ourselves is also to strip from demands of a society that forces us to consume so we can have value, that forces us to consumed in the name of the interests of a few, that forces us loyalty to our own ego, that forces us to depart from connections with more people and beings and all that exists.
To innovate is to build meaning to our own lives. To innovate is to make a stand to offer dignity to our lives and to make a stand that all beings should have a dignify life as well. To innovate is not about do good or do bad, is to build meaning of the doing and, some times, to revisit this meaning from the resonance of our doing in the surroundings.
