If you ask most CEOs if they want, need and even demand, innovation, theyll say, Make it consistent and predictable so I can forecast how my firm will increase shareholder value.

It may seem obvious that a CEO wants innovation to be a discipline, but what about being a discipline in everyday life? Should the average person want to become a better innovator? Absolutely. Being an innovator is synonymous with being a problem solver, and solving problems leads to a higher quality of life.

Innovation drives competitiveness in a person, community, business or country and is widely considered an important capability. It is also very difficult to argue that innovation is a bad thing when a simple Google search of the term yields more than 420 million citations in less than 1 second – most of them positive.

What Is It?

However, innovation is like the weather: It is widely discussed, but poorly understood while being critically important. How does one approach the topic of becoming more innovative? Perhaps an old adage is useful: How does one eat an elephant? The obvious answer is: One bite at a time.

What Im suggesting is that innovation can be broken down into simple elements, providing a roadmap people can follow on their journey to becoming innovators and more effective problem solvers. Innovative people who become skilled problem solvers have a higher quality of life. If you accept this, then everyone should aspire to becoming more innovative: But how?

Becoming an innovator is like learning to ride a bicycle: At first, its daunting. Then its easy and fun. Finally, its mastered and never forgotten. In effect, bike riding becomes a discipline. Treated in the same way, innovation can not only mastered but constantly improved.

The real question is: How does one teach, learn and master innovative behavior so it becomes a discipline? My hypothesis is simple:

Everyone is capable of, and desires to be, innovative;

Innovative behaviors can, and must be, taught, learned and mastered over a lifetime;

Once mastered, innovative behaviors become a discipline never forgotten;

Innovators and problem solvers are synonymous;

Innovators solve more problems leading to a more fulfilling life;

Innovation is fun to teach and do.

Innovation, in its simplest definition, is a human response to change, creating something valuable in the present. It is important to realize that all human beings are born with the ability to innovate because our DNA demands that we adapt to change to survive. Simply put, we are a successful species because we are innovative.

So what happened? Why is being innovative so difficult and even rare? The simple answer is that life got easy. We dont need to solve life preserving problems today to survive, and we are educated not to be innovative. Curiosity and inquiry are the roots of all innovation, and most educational systems give credit for answers and not questions. Worse yet, a curious, potentially innovative, student often is punished or stifled.

Dealing with Change

Being innovative demands that people recognize the changes around them, be curious enough to investigate what the change means and create options for responding to this change as a way of creating value. The first steps toward becoming more innovative are:

1. Recognize and analyze the changes around you;

2. Allow your natural curiosity to characterize the change;

3. Develop a hypothesis for responding to the change;

4. Put your hypothesis into action;

5. Assess the results;

6. Create a new hypothesis;

7. Repeat the process until you have a way to create value, however you define it.

This process should be familiar because it is the scientific method. While simple in form, it is difficult to master. All innovations have common features applying to all circumstances, while concurrently being situational or impacted by the context in which innovation occurs. The situational element of innovation is one reason why innovative methods that work for one company do not work for another.

Especially challenging is the fact that innovative people are not innovators by themselves. The lone innovator is the exception, not the rule. This fact alone raises many questions about how collaboration should work. Well cover that in a future article.

Suffice it to say that the critical characteristics of innovation are:

1. Collaborative – innovation occurs in groups of people often engaged in playful activities;

2. Involves diversity and many skills – innovation occurs when a group of people with different skills assemble in response to a given change;

3. Results from trial and error – experimentation is the cornerstone of learning, allowing people to intelligently respond to change;

4. Driven by inquiry – the natural child-like curiosity we all have needs to be reinforced as a way of learning by doing and being open-minded about whats possible;

5. Expands by imagination -imagination is how people connect unrelated dots in unexpected and innovative ways; innovators have a child-like imagination that is unbiased by experiences;

6. Has to be fun – an innovator requires a playful point of view that is motivated by ones passion.

These characteristics need to be recognized and embraced by would be innovators.

Success Factors

The critical success factors for becoming an innovator are actually straightforward, common sense, normal activities we all embrace without even knowing it. By recognizing these success factors, one begins transforming innovative behavior from an art form into a discipline. The critical success factors are:

1. Only people can innovate because only people can think. Innovative behavior requires thinking about the changes being experienced and responding accordingly.

2. This thought process needs to be educated so that innovative people have some past experience from which to understand the change occurring. This is why innovation is a collaborative effort, involving many people and not just one person. When confronted with change an innovator asks: Whats this like? not Why did this happen?, What does this means? or What do I do? By asking What is this like? Innovative people begin to understand the change.

3. Learning must occur in multiple ways – by doing, watching, listening, writing and reading about the change. People must recognize their preferred way of learning and use this as a tool for becoming innovative.

4. The environment needs to be safe for inquiry with failure allowed and even encouraged. Learning by experiment, which is learning by experiencing, is the most impactful form of education, although those who can learn from the experiences of others are usually wise and far more innovative.

Future articles will begin peeling the innovation onion one layer at a time until we get to the core of how everyone can make innovative behavior a discipline.

Innovation in a Nutshell