Where does innovation come from?

For organisations, the ability to innovate is essential if they are to remain effective in the long term. As the world around them changes, they need to respond, adapt and grow.

But where does innovation come from?

Innovation is really just a fancy term for "having new ideas".

So, moving the goal posts slightly, where do new ideas come from?

We often I think have a sense that new ideas are built from scratch, in a heroic feat of originality. But this actually not the case. In A Technique for Producing Ideas, a tiny book written for advertising executives in the 1960s, James Webb Young says:"

An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements

I find that this idea makes sense when I try it on. The process of creativity is about reaching into the sea of ideas that exist in your culture, and spinning them together in a way that makes them new and fresh. This accounts for how "there is nothing new under the sun" and "the only constant is change" are both somewhat true!

The fact that you do not need an infinite supply of elements to create enormous variety is also illustrated in our DNA. 4 buildings blocks, and a huge array of life. Or human personalities and psychologies: we are all driven by the same set of fundamental needs, and yet we are all astonishingly different.

When it comes to generating something truly innovative, it is the specific (re-)combination of elements that counts.

Within an organisation, we can increase our ability to do this - to recombine ideas until we find some new configuration that does something exceptional - by widening the pool of ideas that we're playing with. When teams have strong relationships with each other, and therefore feel safe to share more of their ideas, we massively increase the chance of a valuable collision occurring.

The process for improving innovation therefore goes something like this:

Invest in relationships --> Increase trust --> Bigger pool of ideas --> More creativity --> More innovation

As ever, it starts with relationships.