They always force me to unglue some of my preconceived ideas thankfully, and then I can stick them back together again into a whole new pattern.

To be honest, I still have not fully figured out why I keep pondering over Rowan Gibson’s “The Four Lenses of Innovation: a power tool for creative thinking”, which will be published in early March, and why it is forcing me to reconcile different thoughts in my mind.

Rowan Gibson’s previous book was “Innovation to the Core- a blueprint for transforming the way your company innovates”, which he co-authored with Peter Skarzynski. It has been one of my favourites since it came out in 2008.

I often dip into this book and refer to some of its thinking and frames that have emerged following its publication. One of those frames was the “The Four Lenses of Innovation”, outlined in Chapter Three, which became the basis for Rowan’s new book.
Here is the first thing that threw me

Rowan decided not to do a sequel to “Innovation to the Core”. In many ways he wanted to step away from what he calls “enterprise innovation” and make this new book simply a very different kind of book, delving a little deeper into the front end of the innovation process.

The “four lenses” tackle the subject of creativity far more than its predecessor; it explores how the human mind works and encourages readers to recognize their own creative genius. Rowan takes the reader on a significant journey, even going back in time to consider historical examples that show how we all can discover great opportunities.

The four lenses are a tool to provide us with the ability to find and explore fresh perspectives. He calls these “four perceptual lenses” and when he went back and studied successful innovation it uncovered and reinforced his belief in this tool for each of us to uncover insights and opportunities.

Without doubt this book reflects Rowan’s current focus

I decided to ask him a number of questions to clarify some of my thinking after I had been through the manuscript he sent to me for providing a review. He states “writing a book is an expression of what interests you personally at a certain point of time in your life and career” He believes he is “baring his soul a little bit” and looking to help people understand creativity and innovation a little better, by joining the dots between a few things. I certainly think he helps us understand him and how he has gone about this ‘creative process’ himself.

Rowan sets about to unpack the creative process a little more. Ideas are built within our minds. We collect many thoughts that initially may be random, but as these connect they become the kernel of a new idea. Rowan defines an idea as a “new pattern of thoughts”.

The book is about exploring and explaining the thought processes that lead to new ideas by mapping them through these four lenses back in history, from ancient times, through the Renaissance period, telling some stories of Edison, Einstein and bringing us more up to date with a host of contemporary ones of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in this exploration journey of how big ideas are actually built.

He is embarking to take us on a journey, a quest to discover the creative genius that is inside us all.

So what are the four lenses that the book is built around?
Four particular perspectives or patterns of thinking make up the lenses and they get fully explored in part one of the book – “the Mind of the Innovator”:

1. Challenging Orthodoxies: Questioning deeply entrenched beliefs and assumptions, and exploring new and highly unconventional answers
2. Harnessing Trends: Recognizing the future potential of emerging developments, and using these trends to open up new opportunities
3. Leveraging Resources: Understanding our limitless capacity for redeploying skills and assets in new ways, combinations or contexts
4. Understanding Needs: Paying attention to issues and frustrations others have ignored, and experimenting with new solutions to problems

Part two of the book turns toward “the Power of Patterns”

Here Rowan really starts to explore the neuroscience stuff as the place for us to understand some of the many mental barriers to innovation. It looks at why most of us are not using those innate creative skills that we were born with but seem to file away after childhood. The way we think – as “pattern recognizers” – often holds us back.

We are taught certain patterns of thought and behaviour as we grow up, and we recognize these patterns all the time, but we often don’t question them anymore.

As Rowan suggests, this is a cognitive condition called “functional fixedness” and often becomes the mental block that we have to unlock so we can regain a fresh perspective. He argues that many of us are running on a kind if mental “autopilot” and we simply stop noticing or questioning things.

We become blind to the changes, the new patterns and the new opportunities that are all around us.

Part three takes you into “Looking Through the Four Lenses”
This is the part that takes you through each of the four lenses of challenging orthodoxies, harnessing trends, leveraging resources and understanding needs. Each has brief “lessons to take away” within its dedicated chapters to help distil each of the framing messages.

This part of the book does really climb into current examples to reinforce the lenses and their value. Rowan introduces the 3R in the “leveraging resources” section but in many ways the question to keep asking throughout the book is “how can we repurpose, redeploy or recombine our skills and assets in order to open up to new growth opportunities?” and “how can we extend the boundaries of our businesses?”

Part four is all about “How Big Ideas Are Built”

There is a definite thinking process involved in constructing a breakthrough. Rowan provides views on Archimedes and suggests that Einstein provides us with an excellent model of the master idea-builder as he used his creativity to rethink the universe.

Then he considers Thomas Edison – perhaps the most prolific innovator of all time – describing his approach and then suggesting that in each of these cases “their genius seems to have followed a formula” and layers on many more examples to underpin this, bringing us back through the four lenses and describing Rowan’s eight-step model of the creative process.

The book keeps asking and raising questions about this creative process

As I suggested earlier, this is a personal journey of looking at creative genius through this four lenses framework. Rowan wanted to write a very different kind of book, and he wanted to project some of his own vibrancy, passion and excitement about innovation.

The finished book is in itself very creative in its layout, design and presentation.

It contains 304 pages of full-colour illustrations, really bringing the whole subject of creativity and innovation to life. I firstly read the manuscript, and then I received a copy of one of the finished chapters and went “Wow!”

What a transformation. The book’s design made that creative distinction. It complimented and really helped to break down this amazing journey in pursuit of creative genius.

So why does it leave me still with questions about the book?

I wrote to Rowan that I needed to firstly separate before I recombine. I was not a lover of his Preface – it is a little overhyped, overworked, it forced me to judge far too early and I have needed to keep peeling away at this and get deeper into the structure and messages to resolve this reaction.

I like to discover more as something unfolds, not to be confronted with it. In some ways, I’m not sure the preface and opener fit the journey of what lies within the book but that, of course, could simply be me.

I was reading in his Preface that the ‘four lenses’ has had such an impact on companies over the last two decades, with the result that “thousands” have already seen its value as a technique, yet with many people coming up to Rowan at his events and asking about the four lenses, he chose not to start the book with the “here and now” but significantly with the historical route and that equally threw me.

Was this a case of simply retrofitting or providing its real value through this growing recognition of applying these lenses across history and in this way, showing its underlying value?

In some ways, I wanted to immediately get my hands on the “here and now” stuff raised up in the Preface as proof, making it more contemporary, relevant and applicable to take hold of this technique in today’s world and why so many were adopting it as a creative tool.

But Rowan told me, “I wanted to give a more historical basis to the creativity and innovation thinking patterns, reflecting much of my thinking and research over the couple of years”.

Fair enough, he does make up for the contemporary stuff in later parts of the book significantly well, with plenty of modern examples, less of his own though, I felt a pity, as it was this demand that seems to have partly pushed him into writing this book.

Yet I did get to satisfy my need for ‘red meat’ but it was the promise within the Preface that raised my expectancies, perhaps forcing my “need to separate before recombine” remark as the book unfolded.

• Actually I really liked the Renaissance discussions – they form the heart of the book for me, they triggered my thinking. I think we are in need of a new renaissance period, especially here in Europe, so I welcomed that part.

• In many ways I think the book has challenged my own need to shift my mental perspective. Perhaps this was my struggle. If a book prompts this then it is doing its job. It is not just informing, it is raising your awareness within yourself. It stretched me and brought out some emotions as well.

• I would certainly have liked to see more depth in the summaries of each chapter. The “lessons to take away” were fairly short and lacked the ability to encapsulate much within the chapters. Again, I would have liked a little more meat on the ‘take-away’ bone.

• Rowan has researched and written a very different type of innovation book. You can be in danger of trying to box it with countless others, all offering their take on “how to”, but this book strives constantly to go beyond that.

• Then, as Rowan’s previous book, “Innovation to the Core” was so radically different, and for me, a consistent reference book, this had certainly influenced me when I was working through this “Four Lenses” manuscript.

• The two books stand at opposite ends of the innovation book spectrum and maybe I was not able to let go of one end to enjoy the other end, and I still cannot fully figure out why. It is good to appreciate different spectrums to alter your own perspectives.

It is a book I certainly recommend. It took me on my personal journey. It did its job. It challenged my thinking patterns. It broke some. It reinforced others. It helped describe the creative journey we all need to travel, which can be full of surprises and we do need to stay open to rethink everything.

Reflecting back through history does often open up the future. Can we have another Innovation Renaissance period please, this book reminded me of our constant need to be creative and keep pushing for breakthrough ideas to advance and renew?

** the book is released on March 2nd, 2015.

The post The Four Lenses of Innovation by Rowan Gibson first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Tackling the culture and climate that is needed to create a thriving innovation environment is complex.

In this post I can only touch on certain points to trigger that deeper examination and offer the stimulus and considerations it needs.

Within the Executive Innovation Work Mat we have seven domains or components that need bringing together to form a new integrated knot.

The aim of the work mat is to draw the senior executive into the innovation process and to support them as they think through what is required to build a more sustaining and integrated innovation understanding within the organization. Their role is a strategic one that sets the conditions and overview on innovation.

Tackling the culture and climate needs for innovation is my third article for raising questions in potential innovators minds. I have already offered some thoughts on Governance for innovation and the Environment conditions required. Before this current series I have extensively focused on the strategic alignment and leadership considerations for their engagement through this work mat approach.

Culture and the necessary climate do have a considerable effect on management practices.

I always gain the impression that the ‘harder side’ of innovation through its processes, technologies, structures and functions gets the greater attention. Partly because this is the more tangible side, yet the ‘softer side’ of climate, culture and environment makes or breaks innovation. “Culture is the playing field of the actions, transactions and interactions” (Hattori and Wycoff,2002) of the people who search and ‘work’ innovation. Dealing with a change in culture is complex.

• It is generally recognized culture moderates innovation, presently the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” attests to that. It influences the management practice, it provides the climate for relationships, and it directly influences behaviours and performance. Attention needs to always be paid to creating a positive culture and climate
• To foster innovation the ability to create an environment and culture that promotes creativity, promotes engagement and stimulates the ability to learn and embrace change needs knowledge to flow across the organization.
• The climate for innovation is the signals individuals receive on the expectations and outcomes required from innovation. This needs strategic alignment. This needs reinforcing in governance, function and design, structures, metrics, rewards, hence the real value of an integrated executive innovation work mat approach.

By working constantly on providing the ‘right’ conditions and climate required for innovation allows the culture to evolve and become increasingly innovative as part of its make-up. An innovation culture makes it so much easier for senior management to implement innovation strategies and plans.

Along with the environment, culture and climate determine either success or poor performance in eventual outcomes and the potential for sustaining innovation performance.

Creating a culture for innovation requires a new social contract.

In the mid-nineties the work of Goffee and Jones provided this idea of the social contract. If you want to set about establishing a new way of behaving it does need to become a new social contract.

The risk was that if it was not clearly seen as an improvement over the old, it just did not work any better, it would be consigned to being little more than the latest initiative or fad and treated as such. To change the culture requires the management of attention (Van de Van, 1996) otherwise you are constantly moving through different crisis.

• It is the management of the organization that determines the culture, its values, its practices and behaviours.  It is theirs to create. The creating of one that promotes creativity, is fully engaged, and has shared values and beliefs.
• The culture of the organization is ultimately a reflection of the leaderships own approach to their practices. If the leadership is seen to seek the short-term, varies its operating practices and does not apply the same value and practices it expects from others, it will never start a positive cultural change for managing innovation, unless through threat and fear, and that is not sustaining.

If an organization wishes to build a unique competitive edge, it is largely going to come through its people, the culture and practices they wish to stimulate.

In truth we face the hard questions that need leadership resolution?

• Culture can be the most important barrier to delivering on innovation programmes as Culture has a profound influence on innovation’s success, where is it in your thinking?
• Replacing all the past years of efficiency and right-sizing what will bridge the present feeling of little incentive, low energy, desire or motivation to consider new ideas or initiatives? Why would employees stick their hand up to be seen? The risks?
• How do you break the existing ‘business as usual’ culture that dominates?
• What do you do to overcome the “not-invented here” syndrome often found in most functions? How are you breaking down the silo’s of activity and knowledge?
• The organization ‘antibodies’ will fight innovation if they feel threatened
• What about all those years of pursuing the short-term, reacting to those ‘prevailing’ market conditions by downsizing becomes ‘baked in’ so anything new that is challenging this has a serious set of barriers to overcome. Can this change? Leaders need to decide.
• If you have employed the approach over many years of incremental is innovation how can you alter these existing behaviours, routines and practices associated with this ‘improvement’ only mentality?
• Middle managers fall back and use their existing tools, methods and techniques in poor attempts to manage innovation. They feel threatened and vulnerable and will block change unless they become part of the solution and not seen as ‘locked into’ part of the problem. This is a critical blocking point for innovation to ‘take hold’ or not.
• People are rational actors; they gravitate to the tasks aligned to their elevation, job description, reward metrics and background training.
• The choice of work tends to move towards safe, familiar products, structures and systems over the potential ‘risk’ associated with innovation unless something radically changes.
• Any system that reinforces the status quo will resist innovation as it is risky and insecure.
• Irrespective of the demands for innovation from the top, the established culture simply resists or makes token efforts.

So which ones apply in truth within your organization to resolve?

Our solutions need organizations to play for the long game.

There is the need to change many of the current factors that make up the culture and climate to achieve full engagement but this takes time and serious top management commitment

• It is recognized by 70% of our organizations from research, they regard the CEO as the most important source of developing a culture for innovation to thrive and survive.

• To identify the conditions to make this sort of substantial change in the necessary cultural attributes and characteristics is really hard work
• Changing prevailing attitudes, behaviours, compensation and rewards needs careful, considered and dedicated attention
• Corporate culture does not change easily or quickly, often the old submerges often waiting for the right time to resurface and regain its grip on this is the ‘why we do things around here’
• The work of a HR team and talent recognitions on how to innovate, the attributes, the traits and characteristics, and then understanding these needs auditing to discover what you have in potential. This enables you to decide what needs to come into the organisation to infuse it differently and then be specifically managed.
• This whole programme of possible renewal needs a robust internal and externally supporting set of programmes.

In summary we need to offer a culture that will look so different.

The ultimate aim is to instil a culture that places trust, open communication, and those behaviours that seek out innovation and rise to the challenge. A more open, confident culture that actively manages the risk, opportunities and learning as natural and exciting. One that has ‘measured failure’ as part and parcel of the knowledge gained and drawn experiences within the new culture.

A place where there is a growing sense of personal accountability, passion and pride and a reverence, appreciation and respect for tapping into the talent and knowledge that resides inside and outside the organization, where collaboration and networking is second nature.

Lastly where the orientation is outward looking, identification with the customer and their experience dominates thinking and innovation design.

People are the vital part in innovation

It can only be re-emphasised that people are the vital part to innovation, everything else is subservient. To build a lasting culture to innovate requires significant engagement and commitment and this can only come from the top with nothing else than their full engagement, otherwise it will not be perceived as important.

Changing the culture needs addressing in a comprehensive fashion or you will be left with much of the existing culture that will prevail and innovation’s performance will remain as it is currently, or will be much poorer if you attempt to meddle only with selective parts .

Is your organization’s existing innovation good enough? I would certainly question that it is in today’s hyper competitive globally connected world but tackling the culture needs real strategic commitment? The work mat draws out the issues to then wrestle with them and find the level of engagement achievable and what this will truly mean in the organization’s lasting bond with innovation. Leadership can only decide.

The post Recognizing the conditions for changing innovation in culture and climate first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology requires investigation and engagement across the seven domains or components that make up the work mat.  The aim of any work mat discussions undertaken with executives focuses upon bringing out the parts necessary for innovation to happen and that needs an integrated approach and lasting engagement from senior management.

In a series of articles I will be looking at each of the seven components within the work mat to raise questions to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations determined to build a lasting innovation competence and structure.

I’ve already offered some opening thoughts on Governance and Innovation, for me one of the basic building blocks for innovation lies in creating the right conditions for an Environment to innovate.

So what are those environmental conditions required for innovation?

You can’t escape the fact having the right environment for innovation means different things to different people. It has general conditions, a ‘broad church’ approach that needs to be consciously set about to create the atmosphere that encourages and nurtures innovation.

The environment needs to be connected into the vision around innovation, it needs to offer many of the conditions that connect innovation in people’s minds, so it translate into “that fantastic place to work” or “I feel listened too, valued and making a contribution”. Innovation needs the right conditions and for your organization to foster a unique environment to prosper and grow.

The Environment offers the place, time and space to chase after those innovation challenges. It ‘creates’ conditions that inspire you, you want to be stretched both in mind and body to achieve something worthwhile, valued and making a contribution, turning ideas into winning propositions.

The environment needs to resonate so you can feel the buzz.

Increasingly organizations are recognizing the cubicles and boxes provided are killing creativity, reducing communications and creating the space for increased withdrawal. We are killing the meaning at work.

For innovation to work, we need to open up the minds, work hard at creating a physical space that is well designed, offering the opportunity for allowing engagement in. To achieve a certain association with a working environment makes people comfortable and wanting to be more creative, engaged and eager to take part.

We need to offer creative spaces, we need to let in light, and we want to offer back the “inner work life” that gives up the emotions, motivations and perceptions as suggested by Teresa Amabile in her co-authored piece “How leaders kill meaning at work.”  People need a sense of purpose beyond the mundane and it does come from the working conditions with the consistent actions to reinforce this, and this comes from the top of organizations.

Firstly we need to reflect on what innovation needs to overcome

• Innovation spans multiple time frames; it cuts across business disciplines and challenges the corporate silo. Every corporate boundary set up in physical space, in rules and regulations is already full of ‘yawning’ gaps for ideas and energy to flow across and close those disconnected gaps.

• There are considerable hurdles for innovation to overcome. The larger your organization the harder it is for innovation to flow. Executives need to consciously work on breaking down boundaries, challenge fixed mind sets,inertia or dogma’s and conflicting needs that lurk in each corner of the building or across the global organization.

• The ability to consciously encourage a positive supportive environment is vital. The ability to draw people in, to unite them over goals, priorities and their allocated responsibilities and how they are open and receptive are simply a daily task we need to work on, all the time.

Measures for the environment start with the ‘broad brush’ and then refine

• Executives through a ‘broad brush’ approach can define interactions, behaviours and resolution procedures. These generalizations become important; they give you the line of sight, the ability to measure your environment and evaluate how it is functioning. Your can begin to ‘sense and feel’ this.

• Organizations increasingly need to develop the conditions that allow people the collective abilities to react quickly and be more agile in their work. The ability to be authentic and get the true needs on the table, understood and shared provides closer association and part of any organizations greater alignment objectives

• Then you seek out the ability to create top down, bottom up combinations and where you work consciously to reduce the middle that is often blocking this.

• Finally, the combination of abstract levels for encouragement of fresh thinking and the ability to provide degrees of freedom to organize and act are important to build for the right environment conditions.

Structuring the conditions for the innovation environment

Organizations clearly struggle with complexity. Knowing where the knowledge resides helps unlock this. The growing use of centres of excellence can help here

There is an increasing recognition that knowledge management does need a system that structures it accordingly so people can explore its key phases to help them. I’ve written a fair number of times on Absorptive Capacity and its great value to managing the knowledge flows required for innovation. We need to acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit and our complexity needs to address these basic needs.

The openness to others both internal and external, needs creating the right open conditions to change, to exchange, to encourage that ability to act so as to capture and communicate opportunities that are flowing all around you, inside and outside your organizations.

A code of trust becomes so vital to creating the right conditions for an environment to innovate. I wrote some time about the two sides of an equation for shaping innovation. One was the environment and other was its governance. Governance must be explicit on trust and how it intends to foster and manage this. If you lose trust, you lose the pulse required for innovation. These two together offer the conditions to allow innovation to prosper or be constantly constrained.

The challenge is redesigning the new workspace

We are working far more at managing by exception and innovation aids this learning. We are working through the combining of vertical and physical worlds, we are extending beyond our own ‘working’ environment increasingly. Environments need to permit individuals to ‘craft their own ways’ through what they learn, how they engage, what they contribute. Our environment needs to embrace a more social one. Knowledge understanding and translation need the right environment to be allowed to flow.

We need to give greater recognition to the organizations intangibles.

We can so much easier relate to the tangibles within our organization. If you can touch it, you can measure it. Well you need to understand the intangibles make up far more of the value of our organizations, some up to 80% and also are essential to understand their source. Intangibles within our environment are made up of the attitudes, outlooks, our ability, space and feeling that allows for greater creative thinking. They make up much within our relationships, networks and connections to allow us to work or block us to feel frustrated.

We seek to encourage open expression, to challenge strange and often those many constraints in our working conditions that need challenging and resolving to either thrive or die. These are invisible walls to the naked eye but can be as permanent as any walls or the things we can touch. Much within our make-up is very intangible and implicit and needs to find space to grow, be valued and be demonstrated in explicit ways. I’ve written before about the ‘nested effects‘ of knowing all our capitals.

Giving responsibility for innovation to everyone

Lastly, I wrote finding space for growing innovation and it brings me back to setting up the general conditions for the environment to innovate. These statements of intent have real value: We need shared responsibility for innovation, we need to encourage knowledge as a central task, we need to work on being ‘collectively conscious, knowing our space and beyond for contributing to innovation. We need to foster respect for others knowledge and expertise and we need to become increasingly adaptive.

The environment we must seek for innovation needs to provide the ‘dynamics’ within our organization’s social fabric, to allow the conditions we believe in too simply flow. Getting those general conditions established allows innovation to take hold and become our future culture.

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Last week I was driving home after a round trip of 700 kilometres and as I got caught up in some evening traffic, the sun and the rain played that magical trick of offering up a rainbow to the ones in that right position to see it.

There was the actual end of a rainbow for us to see and it triggered two thoughts – the mythical pot of gold if you actually get at the rainbows end, and then my later thought “innovation is actually like a rainbow in so many ways”

The Rainbow Effect

They tell us you can never reach the end of the rainbow because the rainbow is a little like an optical illusion. The rainbow is formed because the actual raindrops act like thousands of little prisms that refract and reflect the sunlight towards you. So when the sun combines and those millions of raindrops have this light hitting them and split the colours for your eyes to see the effect.

Even when you change your position, the angles change and you see the rainbow at new angles of these little prisms. The ability to see the rainbow is that you have to be always be that certain distance away, even as you try to move towards the rainbow, it stays that distance away from you, so you can never get to the end of that rainbow.

I just think for many of us, that innovation is often just like that! So it got me thinking.

Innovation is like a rainbow

The rainbow never touches the ground and there is no end to it, it sort of dissipates and that also sounds just like innovation as well, we often lose the focus or the original intent in the final product.

Innovation, as we know,  is made up of a lot of activities, a rainbow of different often colourful activities, that need to be combined together for the end result but they do need the right conditions to produce this.

Yet to gain from “this rainbow effect” of lots of ideas, like the rainbow you need to narrow the funnel of precipitation to get the desired result. Sounds a little like a narrowing innovation funnel or staying very focused.

Funnily enough, like the rainbow, you think you have arrived at the end but you have actually not, in your innovation activities, to get to that pot of gold. Unfortunately the “beneficial effect” has seemingly moved on or simply disappeared so you have to continue the search for your innovation rainbow elsewhere.

The one you originally saw was a while ago, conditions so quickly change and you just have to keep on adding to what you have achieved and keep searching for the perfect innovation end that seems never to come.

Why, simply because you just can’t get to the end, it is always changing, something takes over, the world never stays the same and always, yes always, depending on the right conditions, you just need to keep chasing as you see a new end but it just keeps that tantalizing distance away from you.

Just like the rainbow, it fascinates you, it keeps you involved and moving towards a clear target.

Can we ever complete the full circle required from innovation?

As rainbows are made in the sky they actually never touch the ground, you think they do but they don’t. Rainbows are actually complete circles but you never see the whole one as horizons seem to get in the way. Again I think innovation has this in common.

You never can achieve the “full holistic” effect of innovation we are often arguing for, as absolutely necessary, (for the pot of gold perhaps) because something always gets in the way.

What we can only achieve is to urge people to rise above what they are working upon so they can appreciate the arc of innovation better, like the rainbow. The higher we can rise up, the more of the circle we can see and attempt to make all the necessary connecting points.

The important point of appreciating innovation is that we all value the innovation effects differently. It is like appreciating a rainbow, when we stand in different positions we see often different effects of a rainbow, just like for innovation – no two pairs of eyes can see the same, each observer can see a slightly different rainbow, even if they are standing next to you as what makes ‘it’ up,  as it is always in constant motion.

The effect is different for each of us.  It constantly changes, just the same as innovation – it is unique in its own way to the individual that ‘sees it’, yet we can see the rainbow effect in its own unique way, similar but different for each person but it is the same rainbow or is it?

Observing and absorbing needs a ‘prism effect’ to be dispersed

I also think innovation is made up of a broad spectrum of refractions, the passing of light (insights) from one to another and in our reflections in its activities and impact, just like rainbows. Reflective prisms are used to reflect light, in order to flip, invert, rotate, deviate or displace the (existing) light beam. This seems a little bit like brainstorm techniques.

Innovation needs to work along the absorptive capacity process where we acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit, where the focus is on the “dispersing” and “adapting” insights into future impact outcomes that then accelerate innovation. Is this perhaps like a rainbow?

When a shaft of sunlight enters a drop of water, a part does not pass through it, it is reflected and then emerges back from the side it entered and this process, repeated over many times becomes a ‘primary mechanism’ that transforms into something different and you begin to exploit its effect, you take advantage of “the innovation rainbow effect.”

You suddenly see everything in clear, new colours. Those magical moments when you have clarity and like innovation the effect suddenly takes hold and you are amazed at the unexpected turn in events.

From this point on, you ‘push’ to change the existing for something new and hopefully preferred, something that you believe gives perhaps a greater value than the existing.

Is innovation an illusion – both deceptive and never-ending?

So we will never reach the rainbows end, we will ever reach innovations end?  Or will it always stay at a ‘respectable’ distance, just like the rainbow where innovation is also an optical illusion I wonder?

Just out of reach. Just like our rainbow, it will always be a certain distance away from you and as the conditions change, you lose sight of the innovation rainbow.

You can either seek it out or wait for those conditions again, perhaps like innovation, those conditions are hard to sustain, we need to keep moving, waiting for the right conditions again to get the benefit.

Innovation needs the right conditions to come together, so does a rainbow.

Creating the right conditions and being in the right place is more than luck

Creating those conditions is both made up of luck, being in the right place at the right time but also knowing what needs to be in place to achieve the “effect”.

A rainbow needs light, water and air to produce the right atmosphere and conditions. Don’t we start looking for a rainbow when it rains and the sun shines together?

Well, innovation is just the same, we need certain conditions like culture, processes, directional energy and equally all within the right environment to allow it to happen. We look for these as well.

Just remember, like the rainbow, there is no end to it, it just needs the right conditions. The pot of gold, well it is at the end, can’t you see it? I can – it’s all been told.

“At the end of a rainbow

You’ll find a pot of gold

At the end of the story

You’ll find it’s all been told”

          Nat King Coles song “At the end of a rainbow”

The post Innovation is like a Rainbow first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.