Success, failure and the courage to continue

A friend’s recent quoting of Winston Churchill stroke me as a good summary of the innovator’s mindset.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

“Success is not final” makes the case for innovation: no enterprise, however successful it may have been, can continue to compete and grow without refreshing its offering and sometimes re-inventing its business and indeed itself.

Creativity is not top priority for the emergence of an innovation culture

An injection of creativity serum for all employees – if such a thing was ever invented – is not what the enterprise seeking to become more innovative needs. Essentially for two reasons:

1. Firstly, creativity is part of human nature, though often repressed and suppressed. In the right environment it will naturally re-emerge and bloom. No need for chemical boost!
2. Secondly, and perhaps more counter-intuitively, creativity is only a small component of innovation, one that may not make the real difference: the creative enterprise is full of ideas, the innovative enterprise is full of cash.

Innovating like Apple, yes! But what if it all goes Pear shape?

Most CEOs would say that innovation is critical to their companies’ success, loads of people would want to exercise their creativity and innovate, but whether at the corporate or at the individual level, something holds everyone back: risk. “What if it all goes wrong?” This can be more or less marked depending on the degree of acceptance of  trial-and-error as a learning process, but to some extent it exists in all cultures, countries and companies.

What can we do about it? There are process answers around framing the project and keeping it focused, rapid prototyping different versions of the product or piloting in the market.  But most importantly there is a mindset answer which is both accept it and don’t accept it.