Learning to innovate on the job.
I gave a presentation on why we need to innovate and Design Thinking this week to an audience of savvy technical people, running their own businesses in a technological area. And I shared the podium with a couple of other people.
One of them gave a really interesting presentation on the study of impact. The physical impact when a car hits a car, and what happens to the human body. The effect on an aeroplane when a drone strikes a wing. The impact on the body when a bullet strikes a Kevlar protection vest. Serious stuff.
Even though I have a background that includes a period working in technical functions these are subjects I have very little knowledge of. Some of the new references to tensile strength and puncture resistance, for instance, are just out of my realm of current experience.
The third presentation was on cloud computing, and discussed the cost per millisecond to compute in the cloud, and the benefit over the cost of computing through a normal stack.
During the course of his presentation, the speaker said that six to nine months ago, he had no clue about this. He was learning on the hoof and now here he is, having dived into the subject, committed to using the cloud to compute, speaking to a knowledgeable conference audience.
I understood maybe 10% of what he said. The acronyms that he used have more syllables than most of my words. Equally, when I gave my Design Thinking presentation, I probably hit home with 50% of what I said to that audience.
So here’s the thing. Invention – having ideas – is great. But innovation, actually getting something to market, is what it’s all about. That’s where you make the money. And learning how to design-think, in order to drive innovation into your business, is best done collaboratively. It’s best done when we come in and we work with you, and we teach your teams how to do it, and we impart the knowledge that we have during the course of a real live process.
It’s easier to do that than it is to take you offline, and try and educate you away from the workplace. It’s also more cost-effective that way. So if there’s one business challenge that you’ve been worrying about, that’s keeping you awake at night, that you think may benefit from an external viewpoint and the application of Design Thinking, please get in touch.
There’s no obligation. Talking is free. We would be very happy to engage and to see if we can help.
Future thinking. Future Proofing. It’s what we do.