Innovation Starts with Value in Mind

Braden Kelley is an innovation and change specialist, the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, an InnovationExcellence.com co-Founder, and is the creator of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and a book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (January 2016 release).

  Innovation   Strategy  

What is innovation?

I’ve been refining my definition of “innovation” for several years as I did my research for Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, as I’ve spoken with Chief Innovation Officers (CINOs) at numerous Fortune 500 companies, and as I’ve traveled the world as an innovation keynote speaker. And some of the key themes that kept emerging in what leads to successful innovations are as follows:

• Invention and innovation are not the same thing
• There is a difference between something being useful and being valuable
• Value is crucial to innovation
• Innovation must displace something (even the “do nothing” solution)
• Inventions can be created, but innovations must be adopted--and widespread adoption determines whether an invention crosses over to become an innovation
• Innovations often are seen more as a solution instead of just a product or service

It is no coincidence that all of these form the core of my definition of innovation:

Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.

I develop the distinction between useful and valuable a bit further in my book, as shown in this excerpt from Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire:

“Often usefulness comes from what a product or …

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