Innovation comes from fuller understanding of the problem

I am still ruminating on sessions that I attended during Silicon Valley Product Camp 2013.  One remark someone made about innovation is circling around me.

Innovation comes from fuller understanding of the problem.

I don't recall who exactly said it.  Whether it was Steve Johnson or someone in the audience, I cannot quite remember.  Yet I think it captures the one aspect of how innovation happens.  That is, thinking about the problem and understanding the constraints under which a new solution needs to be proposed.

In its simplest sense, we have to understand the problem before we can come up with creative solutions that solves the problem.

Essential qualities of innovator

Dan Pallotta wrote a blog article on Harvard Business Review yesterday about how you don't need a PhD to innovate.  After reading his blog (which I completely agree with), I started to wonder what essential qualities of innovator are.

It's easy to see that innovator needs to recognize a problem and solve it by asking whys and hows.  But what kind of qualities help a person create a solution that others have difficult time coming up with?

After a bit of Google, I created tag cloud from top 3 Google results of 'innovator qualities':
The Heart of Innovation: 20 Qualities of an Innovator
Innovation Excellence | 7 Core Qualities of an Innovator
The Five Qualities of the Consummate Innovator

Tony Wagner: How to educate future innovators

Tony Wagner is the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard.  He spoke at TedxNYED event last April about how to educate future innovators.

What does it take to be 'cool'?

That was the question that I started to ask myself.  Often we see something and we immediately think that it's cool.  What makes something cool?

I don't think I have an answer.  But maybe I can narrow it down by showing you a couple of cool things that I saw this week:

Rodney Mullen: create for the joy of creating and sharing

Rodney Mullen took a stage at TEDxUSC on May 4th.  Rodney Mullen is a skateboarder.  He started out as a freestyle skateboarder back in early 1980's and won 35 out of 36 freestyle skateboarding competitions by his 23rd birthday.  He then had to reinvent himself once new street skating style obsoleted freestyle of skating.  He draws parallel of how skating tricks are invented and shared with how hacker community create and share open source projects.

Opportunity to innovate is everywhere

Innovation is what happens when you start challenging earlier assumptions.  It is more of way of approaching a problem than building on existing solution.  Because it's more of approach, how you look at a problem, questioning hidden assumptions and being open to outlandish idea are key ingredients to innovation.

Because innovation has more to do with breaking down earlier assumptions, opportunity for innovation is everywhere.  Sometimes assumptions that used to be valid are no longer valid because consumers have changed.  Sometimes what used to be technically impossible several years ago can be possible because of Moore's law.  Consumer may not have been educated to realize there is a problem earlier.  Perhaps they are now familiar with new product and how it can solve their problem.

KQED Forum: Gearing Up on Innovation

This morning KQED Forum had Vijay Vaitheeswaran discussing how to gear up for innovation in 21st century.  Vijay is a global correspondent for The Economist.  He has been serving that post for 20 years covering environment and energy to innovation and health issues.

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran;
he recently released a new book
"Need, Speed, and Greed"

Michael Krasny, the host of Forum, and Vijay covered a range of topics.  Vijay's key message was how we should prepare ourselves for coming innovation-driven era.  Future industries will be more about innovation regardless of the industry, and working on problems to which answers are unknown.  Thinking outside the box, collaborating creatively and innovative thought process are more important than staying within lines and following directions.  To prepare future generation, we must educate our children with new challenges ahead.

If you missed the broadcast, you can listen to streaming below.