I bought into fear of innovation and change until I found a loophole. It’s a whole hell of a lot easier to embrace with the right mentality. Just focus on the reason innovation matters. It’s something we all know. Every improvement makes our lives better.
“Don’t fix what isn’t broken,” they say. How broken does something need to be before we replace it with something better?
Take the iPhone for example. I’ve heard sentiment expressed about the rapid release of newer technology. Just ask around some afternoon. Before long, you’ll meet someone who expresses contempt that a newer version comes out every year. This frustration illuminates a common misconception about innovation.
Profit-motive might drive the innovation or it might not. The innovator might or might not have sinister intentions. It doesn’t matter. The product matters. So does the improvement the product yields for everyone who uses it. Every advancement, big or small, raises standards of living. Every advancement moves the world forward from where it was.
Innovation finds no satisfaction with the status quo. Intrigue prevails over frustration during gaps in performance or errors. Innovation figures out why these occur rather than damns them.
Innovation examines the whole world as a puzzle waiting to be solved rather than as a problem or nuisance of fate. Under this microscope possibilities to create and build a better one become endless.
Innovation and its entrepreneurial counterpart are at their core anarchistic. No set structure or central plan governs the moves. They testify of benefits from the chaos prevalent the absence a system. In such chaos, harmony and spontaneous problem-solving arise.
Don’t believe me? Look around at any group. Be it work force, team, or committee, etc. In absence of guidelines for solving problems people spontaneously generate solutions. People naturally solve problems according to the information they have. I guess you could say there’s an innovator within us all.
That innovator needs to be unleashed. It needs to be given the proper fuel to enact change. And it needs something to practice on. Lo and behold the world is full of problems waiting to be solved. The innovator needs to be given the driver’s seat.
Innovation doesn’t glimpse out into the world and witness problems. It looks at challenges as opportunities to create valuable solutions. It knows pessimism doesn’t solve problems. It arraigns criticism through speech as a hollow approach. Innovation attacks failing systems of thought by providing alternatives.
Innovation debates through the products of its ideas. It begins with a resolve to create. Innovation has little time for thought experiments. Innovation runs field experiments, instead.
Innovation and entrepreneurship witness harmony where once before only chaos existed. They see potential in everything rather than conflict or destruction. They trade in a doomsdayer perspective for hope and belief in ingenuity’s ability to solve problems.
Innovation recognizes alternatives as possible even if they don’t exist yet. That’s the essence of entrepreneurship and I believe it’s the foundation toward achieving a freer, more prosperous society.