Improve Your Way to Innovation? Not Always...

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  

Continuous innovation requires that innovation is placed at the center of the organization and that all parts of the organization are changed to support it. To effectively place innovation at the center of the organization, people must know what innovation is, what it looks like in their organization and how they can contribute.

Most people easily confuse invention with innovation, and wrongly chase invention in the name of innovation. Let's look at the two side by side to clear up the confusion from a common source, the American Heritage Dictionary:

• Invention: A discovery, a finding
• Innovation: The act of introducing something new

In short, invention is coming up with a great idea, but innovation is the act of introducing that invention successfully to the world. Innovation is truly about transforming the useful seed of an invention into something valuable that ultimately achieves wide-scale adoption.

Several years ago, I started an article with a quote from a NASA article in Fast Company:

“But sometimes the better part of innovation, is not invention but effectiveness.”

I thought I would refresh that article a little bit and share it here. I’ve detailed my views above on how invention is not the same thing as innovation, but to build upon them and the quote above--sometimes progress or innovation is achieved by taking value out …

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