ABOUT INNOVATION

Every entrepreneur has a dream of being successful. But, in fact, to enterprise is a continuous challenge. Sleepless nights about unforeseen problems and doubts how to cope them belong to entrepreneurship. To become and stay successful, it gives you energy! Setbacks and adversities are part of the deal. Entrepreneurs keep on going under the banner of 'You never lose in business, either you win, or you learn'. Progress is being made with falling and standing up.
Most often you need to be knowledgeable and experienced for being in business, you need to know the fundaments and have a solid professional base. But what about creating totally new business. About products and services that did not exist before? For this, you need to think outside-the-box. Being experienced does not help there.
There, you need boldness, curiosity, and open-mindedness, and most of all imagination. In this type of business, you need to think big! Something that belongs to the mind of children. In this area being knowledgeable and experienced is more or less a handicap. For innovation, one has to give up the idea of top-down makeability. 
Existing knowledge and experience may even be a handicap.
Innovation is a bottom-up process. It is the result of human interaction, not of human design, created by trial and error, hardly ever the result of conscious design.
Under the heading 'About Innovation' we explore the theories and models that have been created about innovation during the latest decades.

At first we will, on the subpage Success or Failure confront you with the fact that 80%-90% of all innovation efforts end up as a failure.


On the subpage A Language for Innovation, we discuss the need for a common language and the recently defined real European standard Entrecomp, the European Entrepreneurship Competency Framework.

On the page The innovation Process we describe how the interaction process between people may lead to the inspirational spark that strikes and how a team may come to beautiful new ideas. This SECI model is the team perspective of innovation, but that is but one perspective. We also give our attention to the perspective of the individual participant to the process, the organisational perspective, the market perspective, the consumer perspective, and the societal perspective.

A lot of books have been written about innovation, and there are many models and theories.
There is even an ISO standard for Innovation Management (where also LDpe has contributed).
This standard, de ISO 56000 Standards for Guidance and Implementation is recently (31/7 2022) published commercially  by James Harrington.

To realise innovation top-down remains very difficult anyway.
But, in order to survive, organisations need to innovate.
Despite the fact that innovation seems untameable, it is possible for an organisation to improve it's capability for innovation. 
And, it is possible to increase the chances of innovation by fostering a better innovation culture an climate.
And it is possible to compose highly creative teams (for instance with LDpe's Advanced Team Design tool).

Knowledge of the literature in the field may be useful, but many of the books, especially the American ones, make us believe the following their method is a guarantee for success. For example the standard reference book Scaling Up, gives us the impression of a cookery book that leads to the most exquisite meals.
Unfortunately, reality is more stubborn!
The fact is, that more than 95% of the enterprises fail when there is the need to Scale-Up the organisation.
Please read the section From startup to Scale-Up.