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

Patterns     and innovation

Here’s why we need to understand patternsin order to understand innovation. First, atthe basic neurological level, an idea isnothing more than a pattern. It’s a patternof thought elements arranged in aparticular configuration.

So when we come up with a new idea, what we are actually doing is generating a new pattern or combination of thoughts—one that suggests to us an original, exciting, or better course of action.

Human creativity is what produces new ideas. Innovation is about successfully introducing those ideas, and thereby giving them commercial or social value. Some innovations introduce ideas for improving patterns that already exist in the world—for example, traditional products, services, processes, technologies, cost structures, or industry business models. Other innovations introduce ideas that break these existing patterns and replace them with radically new ones. This is disruptive innovation—the kind that totally changes the customer’s expectations and behaviors, reinvents the economics of an industry (or creates a whole new industry), or establishes a different basis for competitive advantage that favors the revolutionary innovator.

So, at its core, innovation is all about the formation and exploitation of new patterns. To become successful as innovators, we need to be able to step back from the many existing patterns that surround us every day—in our businesses and our personal lives—and start looking at them from completely fresh ...