Innovator's Playbook

My journey of discovery to innovation flow

Innovation is one of the riskiest,yet most important,endeavours of modern times.

We’ve all heard about the need for innovation and its importance in organisations and economies. We know its value. In organisations innovation drives growth. For example, Procter & Gamble Chairman and CEO (and co-author of The Game Changer) A. G. Lafley used innovation to turn the P&G business around and create ‘sustained and ever-improving organic revenue growth and profits’, choosing innovation as the key driver because it is ‘the best way to win in this world’.

For humankind innovation drives development and helps us reach fulfilment. The human race has developed through creativity and innovation. In his best-selling book Flow, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shares how, when we are involved in creativity and innovation, ‘we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life’.

Ultimately, organisations, the people within them, and the whole population, in fact, need the ability to innovate in order to develop, grow and reach any kind of fulfilment. Without it we’ll all stagnate and possibly not even survive.

Yet innovation is hard and rarely successful. According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen 95 per cent of new products fail. And ‘most start-ups fail’, says start-up guru and author of the Lean Startup, Eric Ries. So, just like we need to continually innovate to grow and develop, we also need to continually grow ...