How fast can you travel to innovation?
Using the laws of creating knowledge
Driving on a highway has a speed limit that you should obey to drive safely or to avoid a fine for speeding. While you go in a plane, the top speed is usually related to the aircraft you are in.
What is the speed limit to travel to innovation? How do you talk about innovation? Do you participate in structured conversations, or do you participate in open-question conversations? How we approach innovation depends on the formality of the activity we are involved in or the people who explore the subject. In any condition, ideas come and go, and the challenge of losing good ideas if they are not recorded or registered.
During brainstorming, we have as many ideas as possible. When deciding on a solution, we focus on choosing the best idea to use to solve a problem, making the ideas feasible and attractive to the potential users looking for the solution.
Now, innovation involves bringing ideas, finding the best ones, working on making them usable and ending with a solution that works well as an affordable alternative in a user's hands. The speed of innovation is how fast we travel, from identifying a problem to having a working solution.
Getting together with people, accessing databases, and using sources of information to speed up each step of the process is how we reach the maximum speed possible to have an entire cycle accomplishing the desired results.
The speed of getting ideas is only one element that connects with the capability to process the idea, create a concept, communicate with the people involved, find the components required to build the solution, and test the prototype to validate the results.
Ideas, knowledge, and innovation are fully integrated. Better ideas come from having more knowledge that helps produce innovation while digging deeper into knowledge. As you know, you can find missing elements that innovations will cover. Promising innovations are more valuable when they contain uniqueness managed by a small group. Therefore, you need to quit exploring with curiosity to find missing elements until you transform the missing element into a valuable concept that is used as the base for innovation.
Reading a note in Spanish referencing Cesar Hidalgo´s three laws for creating knowledge:
The Law of Experience - By learning to do things through experience, the unit cost of executing an economic activity decreases as more experience is accumulated.
Law of Diffusion - If learning is collective, the possibility of entering a new economic activity increases if neighbors know how to do those new things they want to do.
Law of Intensity - The most knowledge-intensive economies are economies with higher income levels and more inclusive.
Making innovation needs people with a knowledge environment that will produce new things. Reaching a missing part takes time, processing the missing part needs more time, and creating a solution takes more time. The speed of travel to innovation will be affected by the level of knowledge and experience of the people involved.
Bringing the knowledge to the table, organizing the way to move forward ideas, and reaching the result in a shorter time, with the minimum number of resources, will make you travel faster to innovation.
Are you looking to reach your goals before other people, or do you want to be the champion in reaching your goal after everybody reaches them?