Don’t Abandon Innovation

Don’t Abandon Innovation

Harvard Business Review – My fellow HBR blogger Bill Taylor recently made a pitch for all of us to stop using the word “innovation” in 2014. Despite his plea, I suspect this word isn’t going anywhere. It’s too important as a driver of growth and renewal. What can be done, in the spirit of Bill’s admonishment, is to stop getting tangled up in all of the variations, nuances, tools, techniques, models, frameworks, and paradigms of innovation. Somehow we’ve taken a simple concept — the idea of systematically finding, encouraging, and implementing new ideas for growth — and we’ve made it horribly complex. And of course, by complexifying innovation, we’ve probably started to kill it.