The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

LESSONSTO TAKE AWAY

There is an innovator inside all of us—literally everyone on earth has the potential for creative thinking because it’s an innate human capability.

(We have to stop believing that only certain people can come up with big ideas.)

Innovation flourishes in an environment where everyone is encouraged to tap into their own intellectual and creative capacities in an effort to improve existing things, invent novel solutions, and open up new opportunities.

(Example: Renaissance humanism threw open a wide door of discovery and invention.)

Innovation is stifled in an environment that restricts individual expression, independent thinking, and creative curiosity—an environment that enforces blind adherence to standard operating procedures, and that doesn’t allow people to question organizational dogma or suggest new ways of doing things.

(Example: the medieval church—they don’t call it the “Dark Ages” for nothing!)

Building a “fertile” environment for innovation involves creating a rich ecosystem of connections where people can share and recombine different concepts, capabilities, and domains—from internal and external sources.

(Example: Northern Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, where talented people cross-pollinated ideas from many different kinds of fields, disciplines, and cultures.)

Encouraging creativity, maximizing connections, and designing an inspiring work culture are not enough on their own to produce innovation. People also ...