Innovation as a business model or organizational ideal sometimes seems intent on following a path to incomprehensibility and irrelevance. Practitioners, seekers-after, and proponents alike are caught up in a whirlwind of buzzwords, lists of critical-things-to-do, and claims for knowing the single most important next step to innovation. Just about everyone has their own recipe, or strategy, or secret or unique set of tactics. They are everywhere.
The cause of this confusion may be simple: Innovation is not linear, but harvesting the value created by innovation is. And when we try to cause innovation by linear thinking, we run into as much trouble as we would if we tried to harvest innovation value via the non-linear. We are mixing up ways of thinking when we consider innovation as a linear process; in fact, we need two sets of rules to think about innovation and the harvesting of innovation, much as we need two sets of rules to consider quantum mechanics and classical mechanics.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Failure Happens: Innovation and Serendipity - Forbes
