“The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.”
— Steve Jobs
At the core of innovation is an inventive mindset. This is a person that is eager and capable of attempting countless trials and errors until their vision is achieved. It is an approach that doesn’t work well in the corporate world, where deadlines, budgets, and specialization rule the day.
In early ideation phases, however, an opposite approach is required. Taking an idea, reframing it, and running it through the mill doesn’t play nice with timelines and well-defined roles and responsibilities. To address this problem, we’ve seen the rise of incubator-like groups within larger organizations, with names like innovation labs, accelerators, incubators and research hubs. The goal usually revolves around coming up with ideas faster and better via out of the box thinking.
However, where corporations fail is the unwillingness to promote the inventive, falling-forward mindset. They’re seemingly unable to reconcile that great ideas cannot simply be willed into existence. It also doesn’t instantly appear by throwing so-called innovation leaders, design experts and researchers in the mix. Innovation is not magic, it’s mostly perspiration, and a little spot-on inspiration. And this is where corporate leaders confuse inspired ideas for innovation.
For in the wild, there are no incubators, no walled gardens, and no moats to protect you from failure. It’s the willingness for trial and error, combined with the need to solve a real problem, that keeps the thinker/doer going. In larger organizations, it takes the thinkers and doers working together to make this happen.
Every generation has its Thomas Edisons, Michael Michelangelos, and Sam Farbers (creator of OXO tools) that are able to single-handedly merge the thinker and doer into one person. But these are truly the crazy ones, the brilliant thinkers with a work ethic to never give up. For the rest of us, it takes a team of people constantly ideating on a solution, grinding it out with the right talent to create that new product that moves people. This is the messy reality of innovation.
The inventive thinker/doer isn’t content with merely diverging on ideas in design thinking workshops, but rather in finding real value in converging, and doing the hard work of thinking through a design solution to its end.
And along the way, if you’re lucky enough, you may create a SpaceX rocket, or settle with a flying car. In either case, you’ve done something that’s never been done before, innovate.