Patterns of Successful Innovation

Most of what you read about how to innovate and how to achieve success as an entrepreneur is irrelevant at best, and a cargo cult at worst. The real success patterns are not well known. They work. If you want to be seen by the world as doing the right thing, keep doing what “everyone” says you should do. But if you want to … win … you may want to consider learning from the patterns that actually work. Patterns that work in health and fitness Let’s look at a clear winning pattern in health and see if it can be applied to learning how to innovate. (Hint: it can’t.) Sometimes you’re struck down by an illness that no action of yours could have prevented. HOWEVER, there are proven patterns of behavior that greatly improve your health and resistance to disease, and related patterns that clearly result in your being able to run faster, jump higher and lift more weight. While the specific advice to achieve these things varies, the principles as understood by mainstream experts are largely valid. It’s pretty simple: eat a variety of mostly un-pre-packaged foods with a minimum of additives and things like fructose, and balance exercise and eating so that you maintain a moderate weight for your body type. For fitness, it’s exercise and practice. In addition to these common-sense patterns, there other things people do that make sense. If you see someone who has achieved what you want to achieve in terms of health and fitness, it makes sense to find out how they did it and emulate their actions. In addition, it’s broadly known that motivation is a key factor, along with attitude and consistent behavior. In other words, study what the fit, healthy people do, and do it yourself. Pretty simple, at least in concept. Applying the Observe-and-Emulate Pattern to Innovation Most things you learn or achieve, you are doing again or for yourself something that has already been done, typically by millions of people. That’s what education is all about, for example. When you get educated, you are walking down a well-trod road. What about science education? Same thing. You have to learn the facts, the concepts, the math. What about innovation? Is it just another thing you can get educated in and learn from the teachers, who learn from the experts? No! Innovation is different. Innovation is some combination of creation, discovery and adapting. It’s being the first. It’s creating something that wasn’t there before. It’s taking something that worked in a particular time and place, and making the substantial changes required to work in entirely new circumstances. Imagine taking a course in exploring new lands in Europe in 1480. Who were the experts? What did they teach? Who could you study and emulate? Of course, there were lots of self-styled, widely revered “experts” who knew all about it. Sure. Columbus had to do it without any help that was actually, you know, helpful! Innovation is not like health, fitness […]

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