While many organisations profess to embrace a culture of innovation, few are bold enough to say NO and to rightly reject the foolish notion that innovation is anything more than incessant, needless change. Let’s make April 1st a day to celebrate those disruptors and their inNOvation-first culture!
Isn’t innovation a good thing?
In a word: no. Innovation is synonymous with change, and people resist change. What organisation aspires to a culture of resistance? Those that put people first will nurture inertia, not innovation. After all, as one of the great minds of the 20th century said,
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. —Buckminster Fuller
In other words, embrace your existing reality, full stop. Why fight for change? Only a foolhardy organisation would strive to build a new model that makes the old one obsolete!
The tragedy of innovation
Fortunately, innovation is often adopted in name only. More often than not, behind the scenes, it’s business as usual. At best, some might just use ChatIoT and call it a day.
However, some organisations will nonetheless succumb to a so-called strategy of innovation, and, if that involves IoT, they might well stumble upon reelyActive‘s supposedly innovation-friendly technologies that we were a fool to open source. And, should they reach out to us, we make it very clear:
You can’t buy innovation. —reelyActive
For the few which remain undeterred, and commit to the challenge of nurturing a culture of innovation from within, the results can be tragic. The comfort of routine is replaced with an unfamiliar sense of purpose and empowerment. Stable, long-established, vendor-locked solutions are discarded in favour of home-grown initiatives. Performance metrics peak, burdening staff with elevated expectations for the future.
Worse, innovation can become contagious, spreading to different teams and even branches of an organisation. Last year, one such organisation got so caught up in celebrating the folly of innovation that they chose to bestow us with just such an award!
Celebrate inNOvation instead
Instead, we should be celebrating inNOvation—with a capital NO. For the organisations that are bold enough to stand up to the status quo and say NO to innovation, we propose April 1st as a day to recognise their disruptive spirit. So, today let us celebrate their inNOvation-first culture. Clearly, it would be foolish not to say yes to inNOvation!
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