In this first podcast, I'm going to do something that's incredibly brave. And that is describe innovation. You know, it's interesting in researching one of my first books nearly two decades ago, I was surprised to find that they were literally 1000s, of definitions of the word, innovation, you know, and certainly, if we can't find a universal description that's actionable, that provides real benefit, then we have a serious problem when it comes to innovation. Oh, yes. And we have a serious problem when it comes to innovation. And what I mean by that is that most organizations and most innovators fail, because they haven't really created a simple and actionable definition that transmutes ideas, and observations into something that has meaningful value to someone else. And you know, after all, that's really what innovation is all about. And I was even surprised to find that, when you take a look online and look at the top 10 definitions of innovations that actually came up in a search I just did before this podcast, it made me take pause. I mean, how many definitions is there for a I don't know, toaster? Probably one. So why do we have so many definitions of the word innovation, I think it really goes back to the fact that people try to make innovation plastic, it's the plasticity of the definition to fit their particular needs. I also find that organizations use the term innovation in a very gratuitous way. In other words, just about every organization has innovation in their mission statement, yet, most of these organizations are far from innovative. It's not just organizations that fail in defining innovation. It's also individuals, individual inventors, and designers and engineers. And the truth is, the majority of innovations are bad. In fact, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office, less than 1% of the patents that are filed, and that's about 3000 per week, ever reach any meaningful commercialization in the marketplace. Isn't that incredible. And I believe the genesis of innovation failure begins with an actionable definition for going to fix it that is. So in my recent book, The innovation mandate, I spent 40 years defining innovation, much of whiskey, which was from my own failed ideas. So here's what I believe is definition that you should consider. I believe that innovation is the creation of new value that serves your organization's mission. And customer.

Wow,

there's really five elements to this definition. The first one is creation, you have to make something, a new process, a new technology, a new software, a new approach, a new government, a new social order, a new community, a new whatever, it's the creation, we have to create something. The other thing that we have to do is we have to make sure that what we create is valuable. And that and from a perspective of technology, it has to be valuable to enough people for to constitute a meaningful marketplace. We also have to make sure that if we're doing this, that it ultimately serves the organization, if it's enterprise innovation, we're creating something for our company, our company needs to benefit from it. And sometimes these new things that we create in organizations aren't a product or a service, they're just a better way to serve our customer.