Develop your own Innovation Skills
Let’s explore how we can be our own Innovation Genius. One of the best people from whom we can learn Innovation Genius is Leonardo Da Vinci. It is easy to say that a person is “ahead of his time”, but rarely has anyone been so far ahead. He could see the future – his insights suggested new possibilities, his imagination was uncluttered by today, and his inventions really did emerge from the “future back”.
Leonardo da Vinci anticipated many of the great scientific discoveries ahead of his time, including those by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Darwin. He even went further than them, turning their principles into practical applications, from calculators to helicopters, hydrodynamics to solar power.
How did he do it? How can we learn from this genius?
There are actually 8 Innovation Thinking Lessons to learn:
1. Be Curious
Ask questions. Do not depend on your learning. You can even question your own learning. Leonardo da Vinci interrogated his own paintings by placing them against a mirror so he could better judge their strengths and weaknesses. He even dissected human bodies to understand how our bags of flesh and bones work. Da Vinci was never satisfied to look at something from one single angle. He turned and rotated, disassembled and dissected to get the utmost understanding of the problems he was wrestling with.
Develop an insatiable urge to learn and to know more, not only about your job or department, but about other jobs, other departments, your industry, the environment around it, your capacities. Don’t be afraid to ask a dumb question.
Tip:
To emulate da Vinci’s approach, it helps to take some simple steps, the first of which is keeping a journal. Da Vinci used his journals as a means of monitoring his curiosity, recording anything and everything that caught his attention, from major projects to everyday chores (some of the journals even have shopping lists cheek by jowl with designs for weapons and flying machines). This process of continual recording acts both as a method for tracking the evolution of ideas and as an ongoing stimulus for creative imagination.
2. Testing knowledge through experience – Demonstration
Demostrazione which is an Italian word, defined as ‘commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes’, reflects the more scientific aspect of Leonardo’s complex personality – that he sought tangible proof for his observations. You can clearly see evidence of demostrazionein the extraordinarily detailed anatomical drawings da Vinci produced at a time when knowledge of the human body was very limited and doctors relied more on superstition and hearsay than the evidence of their own eyes.1
As an exercise, you can try this forensic approach on advertisements. Look at some of the adverts you like in magazines and on TV, and think about what appeals to you and why. Draw up a list and see whether common patterns exist in those you like. Now consider them objectively. Instead of being the passive consumer, think about the strategy and tactics used by the agencies that created them. Notice the language used and the visual tricks of the trade.
Another way of demonstrating experience to yourself is to consider the opposite of what you’d normally do. As an exercise, find yourself some anti role models – individuals you don’t want to resemble, whose mistakes you want to avoid, and who are the opposite of what you’d normally think of as role models (role models being people you’d like to emulate). Observe the traps they fell into so that you can avoid them.
3. Independent Thinking
Diversity is critical for creativity and innovation, which is why it's important to seek out points of view different from your own. Innovation highly depends on diversity as it seeks to look at problems and solutions from several angles to ensure solutions are acceptable for the organizations and customers. If diversity is not present this means the problem and solution are not just not well studied and looked at, but it means a solution is not satisfactory for the customer, which many occasions means missed opportunities and a waste of resources.
4. Sharpen Your Senses
In English, the word sensation is rich with layers of meaning, and Leonardo used it in a similar way to summarize ‘the continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience’.
In business, this translates into listening well and being observant, simple advice that's difficult to heed in an increasingly distracted world.
5. Embrace Uncertainty
Innovation in its own definition means introducing something new, and for Innovation in the business context it means introducing something new to the market, thus, within the definition lies the uncertainty. Lies the unknown. If we cannot embrace uncertainty and thus risk taking, then, we cannot innovate.
6. Balance Logic and Imagination / Science and Art
Here, the emphasis is on ‘the development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination’. In essence, this refers to what we now call whole-brain thinking or the balance between the logical and the imagination.
The Western world has a history of separating art and science, treating them as though they’re independent of each other. Modern educational thinking is now moving to a more integrated approach, recognizing that both art and science have a role to play, and that each can benefit from the other.
You used to be able to get by with saying you're a right-brain (creative, imaginative, intuitive) or left-brain (logical, analytical, linear) thinker. Today, you have to be both.
Innovation requires lots of problem solving and critical thinking, yet, it needs lots of ideas and creativity as well. The balance between is essential.
7. Balance Body and Mind
You might not know that Leonardo was an exceptional athlete, widely known as the strongest man in Florence and an accomplished fencer and horseman.
Creativity is not only an intellectual exercise, it actually requires lots of energy.
8. Make New Connections
Meaning connection, for Leonardo was a recognition of and appreciation for the interconnected-ness of all things and phenomena. Today we recognize this concept as systems thinking or what some businesses call interdependence.
Logical and linear-thinking types--engineers, analysts, and scientists, for example--can have a hard time looking for patterns and new connections, but doing so is the key to creativity.
There is still a lot to be discussed when talking about the psychology of innovation and there is still more and more to learn in order to develop one’s own creativity skills, this is going to be covered in the following book.
1Creative Thinking for Dummies, John Wiley and Sons, 2013
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