I was reading an article over at Medium about 6 Tips for Innovation and the very first tip on the list is “Making Innovating Everyone’s Job.” Sounds great in business articles but in practice it belongs in the same pile as “The Customer is Always Right” or “There are No Stupid Questions.” Just wrong.
Too often people confuse ideas for innovation. Everyone has ideas – some good, some bad, some that are best left unspoken, some that might make a company millions. Ideas are not innovation.
Innovation is a process, not an act. The innovation process is all about receiving an idea (from yourself or others), determining whether time should be spent on it, and then converting it into reality. Innovation is not something that everyone can or should do.
Step 2 is the reason why: knowing whether an idea should have time spent on it. Bad innovation processes involve a lot of wasted time. Not everyone knows how to best spend time.