Invention <> Innovation <> Intrapreneurship

With the plethora of design & innovation paradoxes at hand today, the reality is NPD ( new product development ) efforts and the turnaround roadblocks that are persistent in many situations ( to get from 0 to 1 ) are vastly different from the standpoint of usability that typical ” successes ” define.

Many times and known well often as the:
• Innovation ( it works on a lab bench ) ;
• Innovation ( a transition against the tides of “no” it’s not acceptable ) into usability; and onto
• Intrapreneurship ( at enough large enough firms ) so that usability is increased.
model, this also can be in an entrepreneurship model however the balance remains the same.

Seen in The Twelve Paradoxes of Innovation! and The Inescapable Paradox of Managing Creativity and more interestingly The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs where surprisingly we see the same pattern: the people paradox is not an innovation intractability situation. What then separates the core sections of awareness ( that X is possible through unique invention ) accountability ( through the process of innovation insertion into an already existing or entirely new area of capability ) and then on to acceptance ( large exiting organizational usage via an intrapreneurial stamp of “ok” ) and then ( with large organizations ) incredible adoptable daily usage ?

The separation is in knowing what category of “Innovation” ( a severely overused description ) a situation or activity is part of, and not fooling ourselves where:
• an effort of invention is taking place
vs.
• the unknown valley of death where innovation often has to live and breathe
and squarely between
• the non top and ever pursuing step of intrapreneurship / entrepreneurship, or frankly, selling.

Where we see Job’s efforts to mitigate this with: Focus ; Simplify ; Take Responsibility End to End ; When Behind, Leapfrog ; Put Products Before Profits ; Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups ; Bend Reality ; Impute ; Push for Perfection ; Tolerate Only “A” Players ; Engage Face-to-Face ; Know Both the Big Picture and the Details ; Combine the Humanities with the Sciences ; Stay Hungry ; Stay Foolish, so many of these are standard cannon in the New Product Development toolbox. More we see how Paradoxes of Innovation bind the idea of immediate results with grander capabilities and certainly vision and thus managing creativity is firmly mixed into this.

Knowing, Noticing and Locking down the core essences of the three phases of Zero to One in the rapidly evolving functional and aesthetic hyperplane that is design, engineering and finance and as all connected to an innovation mindset requires a capability to hold desperate and often contradicting capabilities all at the same time while progressing forward towards an often fuzzy and moving goal, however, in the end, it is ultimately reached.