Innovation — Don’t Cross The Streams!
https://timoelliott.com/blog/innovation-cartoons Innovation works — except when it doesn’t. And yes, there are many, many reason why it doesn’t work, with the most obvious being that you can’t innovate on command (“ invent a better mousetrap by tomorrow! ”). That said, the most common reason it fails is because innovation actually falls into a couple of different buckets, and innovating your way out of the wrong bucket is a recipe for disaster. The buckets in this case are 1. Sustaining Innovation (aka “ Getting better at what you already do ”): You know the problem space, you know the skills you need to succeed, and you iterate through creative ideas, testing and refining solutions till you hit your goal. Design Thinking is a textbook example here. 2. Breakthrough Innovation (aka “ Thinking out-of-the-box ”): You know the problem space, you don’t know what skills you’ll need to solve it, so you focus on unconventi...