Our Equation For Innovation
As this is the first blog on the new Lab website, let’s start from the beginning and talk about what we do here -Â innovation.
Once you start to try and communicate objectives to a team, the usual process of pondering semantics starts: ‘What is an idea?’, ‘What is innovation?’, ‘Is it different to invention?’… I could go on but I won’t.
The difference between invention and innovation is a key consideration for the way in which we conduct ourselves here and focus the teams’ activities.
I have read somewhere that the formula to measure successful innovation is:
SI = (i + P + M + L W ) D
In case you’re wondering, that’s (idea + process + marketing + Luck (to the power of work)) multiplied by demand. Hmm.
Thankfully, we have a simpler way of looking at it here. The illustrated equation at the top of this blog is taken from the homepage of our website, and, for me, it illustrates our belief that:
Innovation (in this case, the bike) is a result of taking an idea or invention (such as the wheel) and applying the sum of the combination of research and development to it.
Swap out the wheel in our equation for, say, a caveman’s sharpened stone and one modern day innovation could be said to be the multi-faceted Swiss Army Knife, although that might be an extreme (and badly researched) example, and we tend to work to tighter deadlines than that anyway.
For us, innovation is about taking an idea or an invention that may already exist, or that may come from within our team, and finding a use for it.
So, whilst innovation shouldn’t reinvent the wheel, it must continue to improve the experience of getting from A to B.
Leave a Reply