Innovation is a State of Mind

Simple strategies to be more innovative in what you do

James O'Loghlin

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780730324393
• eBook ISBN: 9780730324409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

A modern framework for practical innovation—from individual ideas to an innovative organisational culture

Everyone says that innovation is important. The problem is that no one tells you how to be innovative. Innovation is a State of Mind sets out a step-by-step guide to creating innovative ideas and putting them into action. You'll learn how to generate more ideas with greater potential, how to grow and evaluate them, test their effectiveness and then implement the ones that are going to improve your business.

Author James O'Loghlin has worked with over a thousand of Australia's best inventors and innovators in the eight years he hosted ABC-TV's The New Inventors. He studied what they do differently and how they are able to identify and take advantage of opportunities that the rest of us miss. Packed with engaging stories and a good dose of humour, this insightful guide helps you to make innovation a part of what you do every day.

• Change your thinking and identify overlooked opportunities
• Step around common roadblocks to innovation
• Generate better ideas, and find the ones that will improve your business
• Create a culture where innovation is part of everyone's job
• Harvest innovative ideas from the entire staff and find the ones that will make a difference

Innovators see things differently. They solve problems that the rest of us can't, and create solutions to problems that we never noticed we had. Getting stuck in routine and procedure is the death knell for modern business. Most companies undervalue and underuse the creative potential of their people, because they underestimate the impact of continuous innovation. Innovation is a State of Mind shows you how to think like an innovator and create a culture of innovation, so you can stay out in front of the future of business.

Part I
A process for innovation

Let's get to the how.

• How do innovators identify opportunities for innovation?
• Once they have identified an opportunity for innovation, how do they take advantage of it?
• How do they think of innovative ideas?
• Once they have an idea, how do they grow it into something usable?
• How do they asses and test ideas, and work out which ones are going to be worth implementing?

There are several things that innovators do better than the rest of us. The good news is they aren't things that only some people can do. They are things we can all learn to do.

The first thing innovators do better than the rest of us is that they think.

Chapter 1
Think

Innovators think.

I don't mean they are all super-intelligent. I mean they regularly spend time trying to think of ways of making things better.

‘But wait a minute,' you might reply. ‘I spend my whole day thinking. That's why I'm so tired and crabby every evening.'

Do you, though? How much of your day do you spend thinking, and how much of it do you spend reacting, responding, coping, going to meetings, arranging meetings, managing others, being managed, reading emails, answering emails, talking on the phone, retrieving and replying to messages on your mobile that you missed because you were on your landline, retrieving and replying to messages on your landline that you missed because you were on your mobile … ?

How often do you get to the end of the day and realise that you have not had one spare moment to think?

Usually when I ask groups this question, pretty much everyone in the room puts up their hand.

Innovators don't let that happen. They don't treat innovation as something they do if they have time after they have finished all their work. They realise that innovation is the work.

Prioritise thinking

When I say that innovators think, I mean they prioritise thinking. They realise that thinking is important, so they make sure they do it. They spend time — often a bit of time each day — thinking about how to make things better. They don't do it when they are tired. They pick a time of the day when their mind is fresh and they try to work out how to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity.

I'm not suggesting you spend hours each day staring out the window dreaming of a better world. What I am suggesting is that, while you continue to spend most of your day dealing with today's problems, you also invest a small part of your time — just 1 or 2 per cent of each day — thinking about how to change the things you do to make them better. If you work between eight and nine hours a day, that's about ten minutes a day.

If you accept that your job, your business and your industry will all continue to change, then isn't spending 100 per cent of your time focused on today, and none of it on getting ready for tomorrow, over-prioritising today at the expense of tomorrow?

Innovation always starts with the same thing: it starts with someone having an idea. No matter how sophisticated your software and how clever your systems, ideas come from only one place. They come from us. And the more time we spend trying to think of ideas, the more likely we are to have them. So, if you want to be innovative in your work or in the rest of your life, the first thing to do is to accept that you are going to have to do some thinking.

I once asked an inventor how he came up with his idea and he began by saying, ‘Well, I was doing my thinking and …'

‘Wait a minute,' I interrupted. ‘What do you mean, “doing your thinking.”?'

He explained that each day he would make sure he spent some time thinking about how to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. He didn't always come up with something, but often he did.

He thought about thinking in a similar way to how we think about exercise. If you exercise your body every day, you will get fitter and stronger. He figured that if you exercised your brain every day and practised thinking, you'd get better at that too.

The first step to being more innovative is to commit to spending more time thinking about how you can improve the way you do things.

The problem is that it is now harder to find time to think than it has ever been before.

It wasn't that long ago that you could expect several quiet spots in your day during which there really wasn't anything much else to do but think. It might be when you were walking to the train station, or waiting for the bus, or having lunch in the park, or walking from one building to another, or in a taxi, or walking the dog, or at home when there was nothing good on television and you were too tired to read a book. It was often in those moments that your mind would turn, without prompting, to problems and opportunities and begin to puzzle over them … and sometimes, just sometimes, an idea would germinate.

It didn't necessarily happen because you were mad keen on spending every spare moment you could in methodically working your way through a problem. It was more that there wasn't actually anything else to do, so if your mind wasn't kept active in some way you'd get bored.

So our minds would wander, and we would free-associate and ruminate and analyse and imagine and maybe even overhear someone say something that sparked a thought that led to an idea … that sometimes became the beginning of something.

That's less likely to happen when you are checking your Twitter feed.

Nowadays those quiet moments happen far less frequently. Instead, we pull out our phones and fill every spare moment by reading and answering emails, texting, doing work, checking Facebook and Twitter, watching YouTube, playing games, listening to music … and so on.

I'm no Luddite. I'm as connected and plugged in as the next person, and of course the communications revolution has brought great advantages. On the bus we can now get some work done, or be entertained by music or a movie or by shooting for the next level of ‘DoomFinder 8'. As a result, though, we have far fewer quiet moments for reflection, and those are often when new ideas come to us.

Remember the story of Isaac Newton and the apple tree. Seeing an apple fall from the tree set off some thoughts about the nature of gravitational force. If he'd been answering emails, checking the news or listening to Mozart's latest single on iTunes, his mind would probably have been too cluttered for him even to notice the apple.

The way you use technology is up to you. You control your own access to it. If we let technology rob us of our thinking time, we can't blame the technology. It's our fault.

If, by the end of this book, you have come to the view that you should spend more time thinking, then give yourself the opportunity to do so. Don't jump onto your phone every time you have a quiet moment. Don't crowd your mind by filling it with information that is of no real value to you. If you create some space, then sometimes ideas will come to you when you least expect them, and in the most unlikely times and places.

If you have a problem or an opportunity that you are wrestling with, then go for a walk or a run or sit on a train, and don't do anything else. I'm not saying that a solution will necessarily spring into your mind. I'm just saying that the odds are much better than if you spend every spare minute with your mind engrossed in something else. Create some space for your brain to do its work, and see what happens.

So you should spend more time thinking. But what should you think about?'

What do you think about? Identifying opportunities for innovation

The first step toward being innovative is to identify an area in which innovation might take place. Sometimes the areas in which you need to innovate are obvious. For example, with the rise of social media, many companies recognised that they could use these new platforms for marketing purposes. There was clearly an opportunity for innovation there.

If you are aware that your organisation's supply chain is inefficient, or that its customer service is below par, or that your customers or clients are not as loyal as you might like them to be, then you have identified an opportunity for innovation.

Many innovations occur in areas that aren't obvious, however. Of course, after the innovation comes into existence, everyone who didn't think of it says, ‘Of course! It's so obvious!' Most innovations are obvious . . . after someone else has thought of them. They're not so obvious beforehand. For example, I don't remember anyone in the 1980s saying, ‘The problem with my telephone is I can't carry it around in my pocket'. Today the mobile phone looks like it must have been an obvious innovation, but back then it wasn't.

So if opportunities for innovation aren't always apparent, how do we identify them?

One useful strategy is to turn the question on its head. Instead of asking where there is an opportunity for innovation, instead ask this:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the author
• Preface
• Introduction: What is innovation and why do we need it?
• Part I: A process for innovation
• Part II: Creating an innovative organisation
• Conclusion: The adventure of innovation
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Advert
• EULA