11 things every entrepreneur should know about innovation

Innovation is not necessarily revolutionary. But it is almost impossible to plan, and requires a supportive culture.

Neil Patel pens an interesting article about innovation. IMHO he gets it mostly right, although his use of ‘creative destruction’ seems a new subset of the accepted definition, and most innovation is not revolutionary although the results often are.

Innovation is the result of attitude and perseverance (from Stock.xchng)

I also notice he uses a photo of one of my favorite books, The Innovator’s Dilemma, although he does not refer to it. I have written a fawning review of what I consider a revolutionary book for management science, but have not posted it to the Internet because it is stuck somewhere on a discarded virus bitten hard drive which I’ve been too busy to clean.

I especially like this portion of the article:

Some people will tell you that true innovation isn’t centrally planned. However, I think they are wrong because you can build a culture in your company that makes innovation an important characteristic.

What people mean when they say innovation isn’t centrally planned is that you can’t say from the top we are going to innovate in this particular way, and then get the job done. As you’ve seen, innovation isn’t planned and usually comes about in surprising ways.

Typically, innovation starts with a simple idea. From there you just start working on that. You don’t have it spec’d out, but you begin to test ideas on people and the innovation occurs as you toy with that original idea.

Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.

11 things every entrepreneur should know about innovation – GeekWire
Fri, 28 Oct 2011 02:35:06 GMT

Exactly, fantastically, succinctly correct.

Read the whole article, and read the Innovator’s Dilemma, despite some of its seemingly obvious conclusions. Because they absolutely are not obvious to many organizations.

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Failby Harvard Business School Press