Innovation is not only interesting, it’s crucial for business growth. Peter Drucker said that “Business has only two functions: marketing and innovating.” Teams in companies all around the world are required to be “innovative.” However, this is easier said than done.

While the human element of the innovation process is the most critical, complex, and dynamic part, it’s often overlooked when teams are laser-focused on product development. 

Having a lot of ideas does not mean you’re an innovator. Innovating is not an individual effort; innovation is an outcome from a multitude of actors. I define innovation as “a valuable new idea put into practice/ practical use, shared, scaled and sustained to transform the ways we live and work.” Without all these steps, ideas and inventions are just “nice-to-haves,” not transformative innovations.

According to KPMG’s benchmarking research into innovation (2018, 2020), deeply human qualities are regarded as the main obstacles to innovation: office politics, turf wars, and lack of alignment. This, again, underlies the human – even personal – nature of innovation. The energy that runs through the process of innovation is profoundly human. Having produced several innovation summits, coached, and interviewed countless executives and entrepreneurs, a model for coaching the innovativeness emerged. 

A model of six concepts that begin with the letter C helps to identify the areas where competency is crucial for innovative individuals and teams. It’s people who keep creating and whose collective energy keeps the innovation process alive. I call it “innovativeness.” Human innovativeness is about “applying creativity in service of innovation.” 

Personal Conditions for Innovativeness: Curiosity & Courage

Without curiosity, without somebody asking, Why? Why not? What if? We would have stayed in caves. In an interview for my research, Nora Denzel, who was the CEO of Redbox, said that she has to learn the most important questions quickly in her role as a turnaround CEO. It’s an art to be curious and to ask good questions.

Curiosity is the quality of the brave. It takes courage to create. Innovating is about exploring the unknown, making bets, and taking risks. It can also be exhausting and make people fearful.

Relationship Conditions for Innovativeness: Communication & Collaboration

A teams internal communication skills become crucial when they are working under financial and time pressures. The long-term success of innovation hinges on communication – internally and externally.  

Innovation is not something that’s born in isolation. Innovations are outcomes of co-creation, but collaboration is not easy. When communication and collaboration fail, the innovation process is doomed. Creativity thrives in inclusive and brave environments. 

Organizational Conditions for Innovativeness: Collective Intelligence & Culture

Companies where people actively share knowledge, skills, and energy are at an advantage. Various crowdsourcing and collaboration platforms that help employees, customers, and other stakeholders to contribute, harvest, and nurture ideas are invaluable. Besides aiding in communicating and collaboration, they’re useful in trend and pattern recognition. These are the seeds for new thinking and innovation.

Organizational culture either nourishes innovation or kills it. Much of the culture is invisible; among others, it consists of thinking, beliefs, assumptions, and values that drive decision making. Furthermore, an organization’s innovation culture can be witnessed in the way people talk and how people are rewarded (or punished) for their efforts – successes and failures. There is a vast difference between posting a motivational slogan for innovation and implementing practices that support innovation. 

Most people agree that innovation requires excellent analytical and technical skills to prototype, test, and learn from feedback. However, rarely enough attention is paid to human life energy, our emotions, that sustain the excitement about the process – even when our hypotheses don’t pan out. It’s human emotions that either energize or suppress each of these six conditions – or energize or suppress innovation.  

According to research by McKinsey (2019), “Innovation, at its heart, is a resource-allocation problem; it’s not just about creativity and generating ideas. Yet too many leaders talk up the importance of innovation as a catalyst for growth and then fail to act when it comes to shifting people, assets, and management attention in support of their best ideas.”

Therefore, instead of considering the six C’s as optional “soft skills” they must be regarded as essential conditions that require serious attention and allocation of proper resources. Strategically increasing skills and competency to fulfill the six conditions dramatically increases the innovativeness quotient of teams and organizations. 

The proverbial wisdom says that “you can have all the riches and success in the world, but if you don’t have your health, you have nothing.” Right now, everything hinges on our health. Our work, our wealth, our future.

As the sickest nation in the world with COVID-19, the United States is heading towards having “nothing.” The U.S. is leading the world in deaths by the coronavirus, and people are left with “nothing” as they lose their jobs. It is heartbreaking and scary. Simultaneously, politically, the U.S. is actively separating from international collaboration efforts and further isolating itself, and, consequently, losing its status as the world’s leading democracy. Are isolationism and protectionism also going to cost the U.S. to lose its top-ranking ingenuity? 

The warning signs were already in the air when the latest Global Innovation Index 2019 (1). was published: “Waning public support for R&D in high-income economies is concerning given its central role in funding basic R&D and other blue-sky research, which are key to future innovations— including for health innovation.”

At its best, science shows its transformative power when novel ideas and practical solutions are achieved under pressure, constraints, and with minimal resources. The pressure to quickly find solutions to the deadly coronavirus pandemic has pushed scientists and engineers to rethink everything. Interesting “frugal innovations” have emerged as scientists reuse and repurpose resources and deploy prototypes rapidly (2). Think of a team in a global computing consortium (3). led by Amanda Randles, a biomedical engineer at Duke University, who developed airflow simulations for a new device to split a ventilator between two or more patients in record time. This created much-needed extra capacity during the COVID-19 surge. 

Scientists gather — now mostly online — to pool their collective intelligence, and engage AI to innovate how to tackle this nasty virus. For example, a team led by assistant professor of biomedical engineering Jessilyn Dunn and Ryan Shaw, an associate professor of nursing and director of the Health Innovation Lab at Duke University, designed an app called CovIdentify to explore how data collected by smartphones and smartwatches could help determine whether device users have COVID-19. The app is expected to help indicate early symptoms of COVID-19 by collecting biometric information, like sleep schedules, oxygen levels, activity levels, and heart rate.

Because of human ingenuity, we are surrounded by miraculous things that have elevated our living standards. We’ve come a long way from the caveman times. The human mind is a powerful organ – but it loses its expansive power to innovate in isolation. Innovation is not an individual endeavor; it is a result of dynamic collaboration. 

Three human characteristics drive the innovation activity even under the direst circumstances. 

1. Curiosity

Foundational to science and all human progress is curiosity. Without mind-opening questions like Why? Why not? What if? the human race would have gone extinct a long ago. (Thankfully, some of the adult population retains a three-year-old’s curiosity throughout their lives!) Curiosity is often thought of as an individual personality characteristic, but it can also be a marker of a team or an organizational or national culture. Embracing curiosity, leads to the pursuing of knowledge and valuing of science. 

2. Courage

To actualize innovation, however, curiosity is not enough. While curiosity opens the mind, the energy needed to act on the new knowledge requires courage. Think of how in The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins asks Gandalf something like: “You ask me to go on this enormously dangerous sounding journey, but can you promise me that I will return?” Gandalf admits that there are no guarantees for Bilbao’s safe return. Instead, he says, “But if you will come back, you will come back changed.” Creating is for the brave. 

3. Collaboration

While you can create alone, you cannot innovate alone. Innovation is always a result of Collaboration. The collective intelligence of humans is exponentially more powerful than the work of any one genius. While many organizations claim “collaboration” as a core value for them, it is rare to practice it effectively. It’s hard to stay collaborative in fiercely competitive environments. Collaboration fails when the pressures of scarcity rule. When we believe that there isn’t enough time or money to do things collaboratively – we shrink. A scarcity mindset only leads to short term strategies for the survival of the fittest rather than cooperation and sustainable solutions in the long term. If leaders were more skilled at collaboration, we’d see more resource sharing, innovation, better leadership, more inspiration, and the human capacity for innovation would expand, especially under adversity.

Only with curiosity, courage, and collaboration can we imagine new possibilities and create novel solutions. Collaboration creates Hope. Like the autonomous spacecraft mission led by a 33-year scientist Sarah Al-Amiri (4). called “Al-Amal” or “Hope” which was recently launched to Mars due to UAE and Japan’s collaborative effort. As we ramp up our collaboration for interplanetary research, let’s hope our leaders continue to focus on international cooperation here on Earth. Our health – and lives – depend on it. 

1. https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_gii_2019-intro3.pdf
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0889-1.pdf
3. COVID-19 High-Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/science/mars-united-arab-emirates.html?smtyp=cur&smid=fb-nytimes&fbclid=IwAR0CKSYYld0KYdjNDQ5QoGSIUnCFf8g6lBqSbY5Rx63eLqudOGZpeDPqvpA

Take a look around you. Everything you see was once a thought, an idea in someone’s head and a desire in someone’s heart. Even you! Now, keep looking around you and pick an object, any man-made or woman-made object. Imagine being the person who had the original idea to create something like this. Did she or he have a reaction to a frustrating problem and made them pursue a solution? What was his or her driving need? Something in their environment either necessitated them to invent or provided an opportunity that materialized this innovation. Something in him or her made them ask: “What if?” Or “Why not!”

Maybe those questions resulted in an improvement of something we humans have used from the beginning of the times like the chair you sit on. For example, maybe he or she invented the chair with four legs. Or maybe it was something that disrupted the old ways of doing things and transformed how we are operating today – like the smartphone in your hand. Humans are geared toward renewal; we get excited about new things, gadgets that make our lives easier and widgets that are responsive to the needs of modern times. This is what keeps our economies up and running.

However, this creation process can be a long and arduous journey. More often than not, the ideas people have, never see the light of day because inventors or entrepreneurs run out of money, health or other resources before they can capitalize on the market. Since we have this remarkable gift to manifest what we think, doesn’t it make sense that we use that power for good? Most people say they want innovations that sustain the human spirit and the environment, create social justice and peace.

People often quote these as their values. I rather regard them as “aspirations” because when I do “the values test”, it is obvious we do not actually value these as much as we aspire to them. To test what our guiding values are, we must be honest about allocation our most valued resources: how we use our time and invest our money. As a result of our societal values many of the modern inventions have come from the war industry – even the Internet was born at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military. Unfortunately, it also looks like we are on our path to innovate ourselves out of sustainability by creating stuff that poisons us and our planet.

Some of us wonder whether it would have made a difference if women had been more involved in the innovation process in the past centuries. Around the world, the efforts to increase girl and women’s participation in the STEM fields Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) will hopefully change the fact that only 10 percent of Internet entrepreneurs across the world are women *1). Or that women are just 12 percent out of the video game developers *2), or that only 7.5 percent of the US patent holders and just 5.5 percent of those who hold commercialized patents are women *3). Venture Capital and even conventional small business loans are still only trickling to women’s ventures. Researchers *3) recently claimed that if we eliminated the patenting shortfall of women who hold science and engineering degrees, GDP would increase per capita by 2.7 percent!

This is a compelling macro-economic reason to create pathways for women to innovate and patent their inventions. This is also why the Converge@Seattle Innovation Summit is going to shine a special light on how women and men are experiencing the challenges as participants and contributors to the innovation ecosystem.

It is time we take on the “No Brain Left Behind” campaign and include all brains – independent of the color, gender or age – in working towards equitable prosperity through human ingenuity. As long people are curious and keep asking “What if? “ with the “Why not”-attitude there is hope for us and our planet.

*1) Innovating Women, Wadhwa & Chideya, 2014 *2) Women’s Media Center Report 2014 *3) Economists Jennifer Hunt, Hannah Herman, Jean-Philippe Grant, and David J. Munro the journal Research Policy May 2013: “Why are women underrepresented amongst patentees?”, and “Why Don’t Women Patent?” in March 2012.