Daily Inspiration: “The Secret Guide to Innovation: Discover what gets you excited about tomorrow! Get excited about doing it! Do it!”

“The Secret Guide to Innovation: Discover what gets you excited about tomorrow! Get excited about doing it! Do it!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

People often ask me – how I write one of these posts each and every day.  What’s my secret?

My response is simple: “I like to write.”

I’ve found that if I am not writing this ‘thing’ first thing in the morning, I get kind of grumpy. This daily post sets the tone for my day and gets me started; it establishes my mindset of optimism and my focus on innovation and the future. It’s clearly an established weekday routine – before I start to rush off and do some things, I do this thing. It’s just me, some coffee, an image, and some thinking. It works – it’s a form of magic for me! This will be post number 1,644 since I began in early August 2016!

Similarly, people want to know the secret to successful innovation. Ok, here it is: it’s simple.

Find something you like to do that you think has potential for being something new. Think about it a lot – your passion provides your purpose. Set out to do it. Do it.

That’s it!

That’s the secret to innovation. It’s not complex, it’s not hard, and it’s not mysterious.

Excitement has a lot to do with it – the passion part. Your passion drives your purpose.

That’s why I started up my Big Future series yesterday, despite the fact that I just finished off my ‘23 Trends for 2023‘ series just under two weeks ago. I found that the process of having a framework to write to, an idea to work towards, a structure of ideas to pursue, and research to undertake, gets me excited and gets me going. That 2023 series – which ran for a month and a half – became fodder for a whole new set of Daily Inspiration posts – it was an engine for creativity. People reacted strongly – positively – to each post along the way. And I really enjoyed working on it.

And so when I finished that project, I needed a new one – so I discovered a new one! I found that doing the research and structuring my thoughts for my first post in this series, which launched yesterday but has been on my mind since last week – The BIG Future: “Regenerative Medicine” and a New Era of Healthcare Science – was a wonderful creative spark. I’ll continue tackling this new series in the weeks and months to come. It’s a foundation for innovation – I’m excited!

So the secret to writing? I like to think about things, and then write about those things.

That’s it. That’s my secret.

What about the idea of corporate innovation? To me, that model works. But sometimes, we need a bit more structure. I had one client who was insistent that I provide them a guide -a framework – a structure – that they could use to master innovation throughout their organization. I’ve long resisted doing this but came up with my Trends & Innovation Model. I struggled when I pulled it together, because, to me, the path to innovation seems so darned simple. And so this is what I launched in 2007.

A framework for innovation? Ok. Study the trends (radar), and ingest them (receiver.) Share these trends through the organization (transmitter), and make sure you have a culture of action that can pursue the ones that matter (trap.) Work at them (factory), launch them (runway) and examine them in retrospect to see what worked/what didn’t work (mirror.) Do this again. Over and over. Repeat it. Make it your culture. Infuse the idea throughout the organization.

That’s it. That’s the secret.

But isn’t that just so blindingly obvious?

That’s why, for me, the secret to innovation success is simple.

Find what you like to do. Get excited about the idea of doing it. Do it!

That’s it.

That’s the secret!