The Atom-Innovation Framework

In this article we explore our approach to answer the question of what is innovation made of?

This is a deeper question. When we say “we want to innovate”, what are the specific things we do to actually innovate?

Let’s begin by stating a formal definition for the word innovation.

Innovation is the creation of value through creativity and newness. It is doing things in a different way so that such new way, as it is practiced, yields improvement (value) to what’s being done.

Being the creation of value the main result of innovation, its constitutive elements are based on and transcend what’s described by the words novelty and creativity.

In an effort to decompose this phenomena we call innovation into its constituents let’s consider what the underlying processes behind novelty and creativity are. Here are our compiled definitions:

novelty is the quality of being new, fresh or unique. Not done before.

human creativity is the human ability to make something exist out of non-existence.

We can arguably affirm that novelty is the result of creativity, and innovation is the creation of novel value.

Now, we clarify our concept of creativity as human because we are here exploring these definitions from a non-divine perspective; that is, we are not talking about creating things out of nothing, but more on the realm of creating things out of some previous foundation. For instance the human creativity is not such that humans spell “lets there be light” and light came to existence, but such that humans think let’s make light out of combining energy and vacuum. This is an important differentiation; we humans organize things in new ways to produce novel value.

That said, the way creative processes seem to work for humans goes from learning foundational stuff, mastering it to organize elements in such a way that we produce novel value.

So creativity is intrinsically linked to learning.

But learning is not the only key element here; as ideating ways to organize what has been learned into something new is also necessary to innovate.

This far then learning and ideating, are not enough to innovate, we need to be able to put in practice those ideas (execute them) in such a way that the novel solutions can be made real. This last concept is somewhat more complex, as it involves putting things together and keep them running and continuously improving.

Now the learning process we are describing here is more complex than just learning, so to speak; we are talking about the very process for acquiring existing knowledge and create new knowledge under the umbrella of many humans over time. Indeed the process we are talking about is what we call research which involves knowledge management.

On that same line, ideating here doesn’t limit to creating new models in the air, but enriching ideas to find out flaws and weaknesses, and also find out strengths and opportunities. So this is what we call the ideation process which occurs not by means of simple wandering, but over discussion of multiple points of view.

For the same token, the execution process goes beyond the very doing of things, into a more structured team-based effort we name development; which involves putting ideas into practice for a more complex thing than just making something a reality, but also making it work the best possible way over time; which involves continuous improvement and life cycle management.

We can land then our conceptualization for constituent elements of innovation as research, ideation and development.

Up to this point, there is one more element that we need to consider in our reflection. This is, the force or motivation that an individual or team may have to innovate. That force is what we call passion, which reflects the motivating force (love or hate) that drives us into excelling at the processes of researching, ideating and developing new solutions. This is not taken lightly in our reflection. For example you may feel motivated to learn about some illness, ideate about possible treatments and develop new ways to actually treat it because you suffer that illness or because someone you love does. You may also feel motivated to figure out better ways to organize traffic, just because you hate losing so much time commuting.

Each of these elements (research, ideation, development and passion) deserve many books to actually develop techniques for teams to learn them. In future posts we will be discussing them individually aiming to contribute better ways to excel at them  from our experience.