Engines of Innovation
Innovating at the speed of change starts with ideas. Ideas are everywhere. Conceived every second of every day. Ideas are easy. But ideas aren’t enough. To innovate, we need to explore, refine, and turn our ideas into valuable outcomes. And in today’s environment, we need to do this quickly and effectively.
The Engines of Innovation will make it easier for you to move ideas forward faster. They will help you impact customers, employees, shareholders, and yourself. Accelerating innovation will require our efforts in three areas—Exploration, Engagement, and Experimentation. We’ll go into more detail in the coming weeks, but here’s an overview to start things off.
Exploration Engine
The Exploration Engine is where you generate ideas, insights, and inputs. It’s where you learn new things, unlearn old things, research, and find patterns. The Exploration Engine helps identify and understand opportunities at the earliest stages. It is the engine that seeds the ideas you can look to engage and experiment. The more seeds you generate, the more ideas you can test, try, and eventually grow.
Engagement Engine
The Engagement Engine is where you reflect and get feedback on the ideas and insights you gathered through exploration. It is where you identify, build, and utilize a collaborative network of people and resources to help you share and vet new ideas. The Engagement Engine sparks the seeds of your ideas. It helps you refine values and determines what you need to act on and explore further.
Experimentation Engine
The Experimentation Engine is where you act on the ideas you found through exploration and refined through engagement. Build, test, try, and learn. The Experimentation Engine is about incrementally moving your ideas forward and creating valuable outcomes.
You must learn to utilize all three engines and accelerate the interactions with each other. The activities in one engine fuel and feed the other engines. Insights from exploration feed engagement and experimentation. Results from experimentation fuel further exploration. The best innovators enable the engines to work together to create, build, and grow value.
If you can learn to explore, engage, and experiment, there is an immeasurable opportunity to create value faster and with more impact than ever before. Which engines are working for you?
Let me know at brian@insideoutside.io.
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