How to be more innovative

How about taking a new year resolution today to be more innovative? A resolution almost midway through the year? That would be… different…Yes, I know it is not the new year and we are inching towards the half way mark. More importantly, would you like to be more innovative? Most people would say yes to that. Most jobs require you to achieve miracles with limited resources. That is where it pays to be innovative.But can you teach people to be more innovative? I believe the answer is a resounding “yes”. One thing is for sure. You can always LEARN to be more innovative. You don’t need to wait for someone to teach you to be more innovative.

Are high standards teachable?

Jeff Bezos wrote in his 2017 letter to shareholders:

“I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. “

Anyone … just about anyone can bring in innovation into the work they do. To start with, you have to make a resolution to be more innovative. Now you are ready to check out some ideas that can get you started.

Leadership Theater with Ashish Vidyarthi

Prof Bill Fischer is the Professor of Innovation Management at IMD and co-director of the IMD/MIT-Sloan Driving Strategic Innovation program. Every year he asks a few people what they wish to do that year to stay innovative. He wrote about those innovations in his post in January 2017.When he asked me what I wanted to do to be innovative, I told him about Leadership Theater – a methodology that combines the science of talent management with the principles of theater. Much of learning tends to focus on transferring knowledge and skills. But it does not address the emotional element of learning. It must leverage others to learn and that in turn generates the learning that shifts behavior.

“It is time to create new models of learning and leadership for a world where exponential technology is shaping how we work. Bringing an interdisciplinary lens to explore new models of leadership learning is my innovation resolution.

Using the lens of performing arts will help me look at leadership behavior with a fresh perspective, I will collaborate with a National Award winning actor from Bollywood – Ashish Vidyarthi to create an offering called Leadership Theater, based on working with “new teams assembled based on the specific needs of that moment and with a limited financial commitment.”

Each offering of Leadership Theater is curated to suit the time available and the size of the audience. When SHRM India challenged us to explain The Winner’s Mindset in a 45 minute window, we came up with Dramatic Conversations. This was the first play I wrote. Our belief is learning is fun. This was our attempt at bringing fun back into leadership development.https://youtu.be/LomlhEz2rEY

Decoding Creativity with Shantanu Moitra

Can everyone be creative? Even those of us who do not work in Bollywood? YES!!! Recently, National Award winning music composer Shantanu Moitra and I teamed up to address this question.I asked Shantanu about the creative process that goes into composing a winning song like “Piyu Bole” (Parineeta) or “Give Me Some Sunshine” or “Bawra Mann” or …The creative process that goes into doing a corporate job or being an entrepreneur trying to build your startup is no different from what make Shantanu create that music.As Prof Bill Fischer puts it:

“What strikes me as being particularly noteworthy about these is that they offer suggestions that can be adopted by us all: practicing  extreme empathy with respect to our innovation clients, being more precise regarding anticipated innovation impact before and after an engagement, bringing new partners into the innovative activity and experimenting with the rules and roles of that partnership, being more thoughtful about execution as well as ideation and in how we balance our attention portfolios between content creation and delivery. All in all, what they offer is not so much rocket-science as practical ways for changing behaviors to unleash energy to get us moving.”

What is extreme empathy? What are the three measures that can help you sell your innovation to the organization (Hint: evidence, experiment, profitability) and many more ideas you can implement today. To read some fantastic suggestions on how to be innovative <click this>What is your innovation resolution? Tell us here. You never know whose life you may change with your idea…===========Join more than 650,000 people on LinkedIn or tweet to me by adding @AbhijitBhaduri in your tweet