Innovating Series Episode 14

“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”

— Theodore Levitt

The aphorism ‘Publish or Perish’ has long surrounded the work within research and academic environments, where it seems reasonable that one of the objectives of that laborious work of research and discovery of a concept is to disseminate it to make it known and shared knowledge.

Similarly, advanced environments of innovation and entrepreneurship have their aphorism ‘Demo or Die’, where the demonstration of a proposal or the mock-up of a problem represent the primary objective, an exercise based on the constant pursuit of ‘tangibility’, of ‘prototyping’.

The process of innovating, with impact, should prioritize that demonstration, that tangibility. It is the only way to guarantee fundamental pillars of the innovation process today, such as:

• Work from the learning and analysis of a problem, to be able to connect it with impactful solutions.
• Promote, through prototyping, the transfer and use of available resources, including knowledge.
• Strengthen the focus on risk mitigation and the exploration of uncertainties, which ends up, ultimately, in the robustness of solutions.