Ideas: The Building Blocks of Innovation

Lately, I've been reflecting on what it means to inhabit an idea and see it come to life. Now, ideas in a broader context pervade all aspects of our lives. You can envision your ideal life, relationships, and career. However, in the context of product design and innovation, ideas are what propel the disciplines forward, serving as the foundation for the innovation process.
 

Ideas aren't finite. It's our enthusiasm for them and our willingness to see them through. The true challenge is to adapt and change them as reality tests their validity and value, which can be infinite. Having a great idea with potential is both a privilege and a responsibility. It's both a privilege and a burden to work on untapped potential. After all, it is extremely difficult to convert a great idea into a finished product or service.

Ideas contain uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes risk. We will never fully comprehend the process of invention, down to the smallest details. Still, we can approximate a structured approach to the process using design thinking or agile methodologies. Innovation is ordered chaos; how you approach innovation is where the order can be found, but the results of the invention are where the chaos lives.

We use heuristics, frameworks, and mental models to deal with the complexities of bringing a concept to market. Personas, customer journey maps, prototypes, and business models all contribute to reducing the complexity of the natural world. They provide us with structured methods for approaching, understanding, and solving problems.

So, where does the secret to successful innovation come from? Does it involve having a repeatable and scalable innovation process? Or does it lie in the ability to distinguish between good and bad ideas? Is it in both? I will be exploring these with the aim of answering these questions and more as best as I can in the upcoming series of posts.