Curtis Carlson, the entrepreneur who helped revive SRI and turn it into the company that created the iPhone’s voice assistant Siri, often asks groups of would-be innovators to write their definition of “innovation” on Post-it notes. The definitions never agree. In fact, he told me, “sometimes they don’t even make sense”.
The moral is obvious: if a company’s people cannot communicate the how, why and what of innovation to each other, the chances of progress are low.
Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 'The Tower of Babel' (Vienna version)
