ABSTRACT
When it comes to innovation, we are in the paradoxical position where everyone recognises how important it is but no one agrees what it is or what successful innovation actually looks like. Everyone is talking about it, and most people think they are doing it. And yet the evidence is overwhelming; innovation is failing on a massive scale.
Innovation isn’t ideation; it’s not Research and Development (R&D) and it’s not innovation process. Innovation is the successful commercialisation of a novel idea. Nothing less will do. Right now, too much time and money are being wasted on projects that never make it out of prototype testing; never mind getting to market.
This is not to say that we should close all the innovation departments but rather that it may be time to rethink innovation. We need an approach that allows us to start with the solution and by-pass some of the more expensive and time-consuming problem analyses. We need an approach that allows us to fail fast, learn from those failures and direct the scarce resources and budgets into innovations that can deliver much more rapidly. This book explores an impeller approach. Most approaches to innovation are designed to propel or push a product into the market. An impeller does the opposite – it creates a vacuum so that the market sucks the solution towards itself.
