Balance between Create, Reuse and Measure in Innovation Cycles

There are lots of definitions for creativity and innovations. It looks like everybody needs to formulate these concepts in a different way. This is probably one of the reasons why it feels like a taboo topic, especially in a business context: a gray area that makes people uncomfortable, a place where magic happens and, if you’re not that good at magic, you better keep a safe distance...
I’m proposing yet another definition of these terms, inspired from real life experience in a work/business environment. The target is to provide something simple and intuitive, something that makes sense and in the same time is useful to support future important discussions and decisions about the socio-economics of innovation and creativity.

Innovation

A change that introduces something new and valuable in your business environment.

Something can be anything: a product, service, process, knowledge, resources, skills, attitudes, personal or corporate values etc.

Business Environment incorporates everything that defines and interacts with your business: your company, socio-economic conditions in which you operate, customers, competitors, market, your image, your world.

New is, as Einstein taught us, relative. In this context it applies to your own environment. If you learn something and apply it in your business environment, and is something never heard of or never used in your business environment, you are an innovator. In your world this will be something new even if it was used long time ago somewhere else. As another example, if your company just introduced a service that all your competitors already offer to your customers, this may feel refreshing within your company but is not considered an innovation because it was already present in your environment (as defined above).

Change is a transition from one state to another. It can be done by:

• Reusing something that already exists
• Creating something new (see definition of new) by yourself
• A mix between reuse and create

Depending what you try to do you can position yourself anywhere between the two extremes. You can reuse what others have created and do almost nothing else by yourself (e.g. you follow step by step a procedure to install a new software on your computer). You could also create almost everything by yourself (e.g. a design company creating a new and original logo for their customer). Most initiatives will combine the two (e.g. create new software by reusing components that have been already created by others).

Valuable is indicating that this change should bring some benefits to your business and, even more, these benefits are measurable (in order to assign them some economical value).

Based on the above definitions, innovation is achieved through a combination of three actions:

REUSE – CREATE – MEASURE

Each of these actions (reuse, create, measure) is adding value to the process, but also comes with a cost. Optimizing the process and thus, maximizing your creativity, requires a fine tuning of the balance between these three. Overusing or playing down any of them can be detrimental. Unfortunately there is no ideal recipe that can be used in all situations. The problem you need to address, your capability to come up with new things as well as your ability to search and adapt existing solutions to your own needs are major factors that will define your own point of balance.

Our graphical representation can look like the image above or like this

or any other combination.

Creativity

Interdependencies

In order to REUSE something you need to be able to properly measure and create something new

• Measure if the things you want to (re)use are useful, if they are profitable etc...
• Create an optimized approach to integrate the things you will reuse with your own, specific conditions. Another example is imagining new ways to use an existing product

In order to CREATE something you have to reuse and measure

• New ideas don’t come from nowhere, they are based on previous experiences, thoughts and information retrieved from various sources
• Coming up with a new good idea is a process and during this process you will generate lots of ideas, some if them will be better than the others. To choose the right ones you must be able to measure their usefulness.

In order to MEASURE you need to reuse and produce new things as well:

• Research and reuse information about how others measured similar things
• Imagine and find the measurements that are specific to your business or research topic. Find new ways to measure that are economically acceptable for you. Identify your own specific meaningful values (e.g. does it make any difference if the probability of success is 90% or 91.335678%? The cost for measuring/confirming the two probabilities is significantly different).

To think or to do – this is the question

Even more, innovation doesn’t usually happen in one smooth change. It is actually the result of several incremental and iterative cycles, not all of them being necessarily a success. So a more realistic graphical expression will be a spiral. Each cycle has its own optimum balance between Reuse, Create and Measure.

As a final point, innovation doesn’t happen if you just think about it. We want to run a successful business – this will not happen day-dreaming about our success. Doing, progressing, having results is another important component of the creative process. As this spiral contains the energy that will fuel your change, transitioning you from one state to another, it resembles a spring (coil): the

INNOVATION SPRING

.