On Being Innovative
by Lizzie Shupak
The hardest thing about innovation is that it’s unknown. It’s new, which by definition means it’s un-proven, it’s frequently expensive, and ultimately it’s downright scary. Meanwhile, the most amazing thing about innovation is how many possibilities it opens up, how exciting it is to change the game, and most importantly, how fundamental to human progress it is.
The minute we stop innovating, we start regressing, literally. Matt Riley in his book, The Rational Optimist [read it], repeats case after case of how lack of access to new ideas causes at best the stagnation, and at worst the disappearance of entire communities. When you play it safe, or stick solely to what you know, you might get some solid results in the short-term, but you won’t achieve excellence, ever.
Innovating is a cumulative process. It’s taking things that you already know, but combining them in ways that you don’t. It’s also fundamentally challenging, because we all form habits, onto which we hold relentlessly. As such, innovating requires being able to step outside your comfort zone – i.e. put your ego to one side and be a beginner again – and be willing to see things from a new perspective. It’s like in Flatland, where the three dimensional sphere is trying to explain to the two dimensional square that a third dimension really does exist. It’s almost impossible, and it takes a monumental effort on the part of the square, to acknowledge that it could be true.
So what’s my point in all this? It’s that everyday, we collaborate with people who on the one hand are calling for innovation. They say they want to do new awesome things; campaigns, events, new products, but on the other hand have personal and political agendas, which, consciously and unconsciously, consistently prevent them from saying yes to the very things that promote innovative things to occur. You can’t innovate by remaining static, but you also can’t guarantee that the things you have now, will stay the same once you start moving.
It’s a conversation I think we need to have more often, with each other, and with clients. We need to figure out how to start communicating what innovation actually entails, and what kind of commitment it requires to occur. We need to say louder and more clearly that preservation/increase of market share through traditional means (expensive media buys, perception metrics, quantity of user engagement over quality, disconnects between internal business divisions), is crippling brands abilities to progress, to grow, to become leaders in their respective fields. We need new language for articulating that brand development isn’t just a Marketing issue, it’s an issue that shapes every facet of a business, and that the brands who have experienced, and continue to experience impressive growth, are the ones who are authentically embracing change.
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