Over the past two years I’ve interviewed over 100 innovation leaders at large organizations about how they are learning and doing innovation for themselves and helping others in their organization to innovate. A major theme was learning and developing innovation skills through working on real innovation projects. Quite simply, you learn innovation through doing it (and reflecting on it)…and then doing it again and again incorporating what you are learning. This is moving beyond just reading or thinking about innovation or discussing it…but actually launching the ideas for innovations into reality. Three of the most popular approaches the leaders I interviewed use and help others to use are:
- Design thinking
- Lean startup
- Agile
You can up your own innovation learning and skill development in an intentional way through initiating an innovation project. You can also help those newer to innovation to learn in a practical project-based way. For smaller innovation projects I work on and teach others to start, I frame this with three stages: Challenge – Ideas – Action. For bigger projects, I use the 7 steps I’ve outlined in the book Innovation Step-Begin with reflecting on an innovation project you could start for the purpose of learning and creating value through innovation. With that in mind, let’s look at this seven-step process to innovate step-Repeat the process to keep iterating on your innovation project. Reflect and incorporate what you learned to keep looping back into better innovation action and skill development.
Darin Eich, Ph.D. is the author of Innovation Step-