This is Your Year - Week 47 - Innovation

What does it mean to be innovative? The term innovation, along with its shopworn adjective, innovative, and its breathless verb, innovate! has become every product manger's rallying cry, every design consultant's pursuit, and every press release writer's staple. The words been wrapped around everything from the latest Apple I-something to a new scooter. So how can one term be used to describe such vastly different things? In essence, what does innovation really mean?

Technically, innovation is defined merely as "introducing something new". There are no qualifiers of how groundbreaking or world shattering that something needs to be--only that it needs to be better than what was there before. And that's where the trouble starts when an organization requests "innovation services" from a consulting firm. Exactly what are they really requesting? The fact is, innovation means different things to different people. 

What does innovation mean to you?

Read more on innovation and Living the Life of Your Dreams - pages 323 - 329 This Is Your Year to Design  & Live the Life of Your Dreams GET THE BOOk!

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