Innovation in any field can be difficult to achieve. Ironically, the more you strive for innovation and put time aside to try to put your head towards your next big innovative breakthrough, the tougher it is to get on the path to that next great idea. This counts across the board, from a photographer looking for a new way to present their work to a business seeking to create the next world-changing bit of tech.
If you want to get yourself in a place where innovation can more readily present itself, there are two key mindsets to keep in mind. First, innovation is invariably about combination. Second, you don’t work towards innovation; rather, you develop a culture from which innovation can thrive. Here’s how you can foster these rules for innovation and some examples of them in action.
Combinations Create Innovations
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An aspect of innovative thinking that often has people hitting a wall is that innovation rarely comes by way of something that’s entirely new. DNA reportedly wasn’t discovered through a direct approach, but rather a combination of discoveries across chemistry, biology, and x-ray diffraction. Many innovations come by combining two or more fields or aspects that lend themselves to discovering something new or better.
This can come from a direct combination of approaches, products, or theories to form an innovation. Take, for example, the online entertainment space of UK casino gaming. In this market, slot games are, by far, the most popular games. On the flip side, over the decades, the classic British pastime of bingo had seen a decline in halls and was rather niche online. They’re very different forms of gambling, and yet, they’ve both very straightforward.
Tapping into the simplicity of the gameplay of slots and bingo, the entertainment factor of the randomness of the two, and the accessibility of what are generally seen as low-cost games, developers innovated to combine the two. Now, we have online slingo. The game was born as a small, standalone invention in the 1990s. As online gaming picked up, its presence drew in more players looking to experience this amalgamation of slots and bingo. Now, it gets its own section at casinos, featuring a huge library of different formats, themes, prizes, and more.
Cultivating a Culture to Inspire Innovation
You can’t schedule innovation, just as you can’t schedule creativity. As you need a dose of creativity to lead you to innovation, it’s best to avoid the formats that can stymie creativity. This would be having scheduled sessions to try to be creative and innovative, or issues task forces to innovate certain products or processes. Instead, you need to create a culture that will inspire innovation and normalize thinking innovatively in an almost passive way.
On your own, you can go about this by putting yourself in different situations. Like sparks of creativity, innovation can strike at any time and essentially just be accidental. Charles Goodyear, who developed vulcanized rubber, happened upon the method of turning natural rubber into toughened rubber when he threw some gum onto a hot stove. The modern showcase of cultivating a culture that encourages innovation would be Apple.
Creators of the iPhone, Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, and more, Apple seeks to generate innovation from within. To do this, they have a set of rules by which they run the company. Firstly, they put people first by always thinking about ways that lives could be better and what it’d take to do that. From here, they encourage everyone in the company to approach any problem boldly and with ambition, empowering the smart people they’ve hired to go as far as they can.
If you want to find the path to innovation, you need to think about combinations of what already exists, and then, immerse yourself or your organization in a culture that encourages people to think innovatively.