Real innovation happens when people do it for fun

There is a growing urgency to innovation these days. When it is triggered by necessity to differentiate the offering, to find and fill unoccupied spaces in the market and to keep up with competition, the stress levels are higher. Companies force themselves to innovate faster and faster.

Fundamental discoveries and innovations happened due to the exploration of individuals who were either frustrated with status-quo or just for fun. Take cases of origin of WWW and Linuxoperating system. Most of the real innovations didn’t start with the profit motive.

A bunch of enthusiastic people smart enough to make technology do what they intended, started with interesting problems. They exercised technology to its fullest extent because exploring new ideas was fun.

With innovation playing a larger role in business success, companies are striving to find ways to get more effective innovation per dollar spent. This puts lot more pressure on leaders and the system. Leaders starting out in the innovation drive, focus most of their energy, time and money on creativity. Major gaps show-up is the capacity of the system to implement ideas rapidly and cost-effectively. Implementation requires intrapreneurs to transform the concepts into reality. Leaders have to create working intrapreneurs – those who enjoy pursuing ideas and convert them to reality.

If you are an intrapreneur, don’t follow money while building the craft. Follow the excitement. Let the craft build its own freewheel. Let the system take care of finding ways to monetizing the innovation. Decouple money from the process of innovation. As a leader, let people invent the future because it’s fun. Real innovation happens when people pursue it for the fun of it.

be a #dreamerdoer