14 December 2007

Innovation and Discipline

Innovation is commonly misunderstood as creativity. And creativity is widely misunderstood as being free, crazy and wild. So, for many people, innovation and discipline are conflicting concepts.

The fact is innovation and discipline are closely related. Innovation is about realization or implementation of new ideas that result in business value to people. For business, innovations must result in profits for the company. Realization of an ideas, innovation, is a very disciplined process.

Even for the ideas generation phase of an innovation process, in Innovation by Chance or by Design, I have presented methods for systematically generating ideas.

Someone uses the 'T' shape to describe innovation or design. You need to be broad when generating ideas or looking for solutions, but need to switch to disciplined and focused execution in the implementation and commercialization.

Without the discipline, great music would just remain in the domain of random noises.