Innovation follows naturally from seeing and understanding differently.
The most reliable way to see and understand differently is to learn from other people with divergent perspectives. This kind of learning differs from factual learning. It is insight — learning to see familiar things in an unfamiliar way and understanding what is seen in new ways.
These other person’s way seeing and understanding does not replace our old perspective. We are not (often) converted over to the other person’s perspective. Rather we incorporate both our old perspective and the other’s perspective and find a new and more comprehensive perspective. We expand our horizons.
Looking back, we see that we weren’t exactly wrong, but we were certainly unaware of how we could be even more right. And looking forward, we discover lying in plain sight possibilities that were invisible prior to the perspectival shift.
But here’s the rub: between familiarity and the new vision is painful perplexity that cannot be overcome through any linear process. It is this perplexity that many people find intolerable, and which kills innovation before it can even begin. This is why most so-called innovation is mere experimentation with recombinations of “best practices” — groping for novelty, sparks of ingenuity, incremental improvements, clever inventions. What intoxicates, surprises, inspires and compels, though, is conceived differently.
Deep innovation requires courage. However, investing in a new, untried offering is the easy part. The hard part is coming to the kind of understanding that yields innovation.