The Innovation Zone

Innovation is not something that happens overnight. It can happen in a matter of minutes. All it takes is to shift perspectives, put on some new thinking hats and perhaps most of all, to get rid of all the hope, believe and trust you have placed in precedents made by authority, history, culture and the almighty THEY.

If it truly is as easy as all that, surely I must be able to justify with some degree of confidence and back-up examples, my not-so-minor assertion.

I do assert this. Innovation is for everyone, and everyone is capable of innovation. Get some theory done, start work implementing some basic methodology; and you will be on your way to becoming what is believed to be that rarest of breeds – an innovator.

A few of those examples to light the path. Let’s see now – who are those individuals who have lit the path for the human race, just living an everyday life of the average private citizen?

One anonymous individual who must surely be one the world’s greatest innovators is the person who managed to persuade billions of women to fight pain, smashed feet and gut wrenching backaches to put on – yes – HIGH HEELS! What else can one label a person who convinced everyone that it is okay to fight millions of years on evolution and to accept pain and suffering? All just so their legs will look hot, and they will have that almighty sexy S-curve that makes men stop thinking with their brains?

So my vote for the best innovator who ever lived is the high heel guy, who looked at normal everyday shoes, and saw the new shape of women’s futures.

Henry Ford is another. He did not invent the automobile, but he saw a future which screwed the world we live in today, and managed to convince everyone that the automobile was the way to go to. He probably was fed up with horse drawn carriages, and I figure he stepped into too many piles of the fuel wastes that horses left behind. Whatever it was, something made him see that there was no reason to have horses pulling a carriage, and so he came up with the engine that would drive the carriage, though it would have been nice if he had thought of solar power from way back then, rather than the goo that dead things turn into.

“There will never be more than five personal computers in the world” said Thomas Watson, IBM chairman way back when they thought the world was still flat and that too many computers in the west might tip the flat world over.  But along came Bill Gates, who believed that a different looking interface, driven by the right OS, would ensure that his product would be on the billions of computers that billions of people would use (or is that millions). And all that without a college education and without the business savviness that everyone nowadays insist you must have in order to become a billionaire.

Need I say more?

Before bald became sexy, men were terrified of going bald not because they would be bald, but because they would have to spend thousands of dollars trying to look like they were not bald. So my kudos go out to that bald guy who convinced the top sportspeople all over the world, but especially in the US, to go bald and make it the new, hot in thing that would stay in style forever. I am flawlessly bald, so I always remember that guy in my prayers, who removed all his thinking hats, and said, “Why just take off the hat, let’s take off the hair too! Save money on barbers and shampoos, and make it the new surface that every woman wants to have and to touch!” Thank you man!

One of the Warner brothers said, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” Along the same lines, Western Union very early on said, “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of mass communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” David Sarnoff said in response to being asked to invest in radio, “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?”

These examples are plainly put to show that common, everyday things we take for granted might easily have never come to be so widely used, if some crazy, risk-taking, future-shaping innovators had not been willing to consider different ways of looking at old inventions.

Do the research, and you will see history is littered with average people who became labelled as innovators or gurus of thinking, simply because they had the right frame of minds to view things differently. It surely does go beyond that, because it is also about putting your money where your words are, and going out to do something about your opinion, idea or perspective.

That to me, is what innovation is all about.

We can all do it.

It just is about believing in your opinion enough to go out and take a risk and doing something about it.