Here is how you drive innovation in your organization

This article follows the line of thinking of the Book: The Intellectual Rage – The underground, unfiltered guide to corporate innovation & bullshit.

Background

I spent years trying to understand the ideas behind the word “innovation”. How can we capture its essence? How can we fold it into an organization discipline? How can we deign a ubiquitous methodology around it? The truth is, innovation is not a one-size-fits-all concept. It is a complex and ever-evolving cognitive process that requires a profound understanding of the industry, the customer, and the technology. It is a process that requires creativity, collaboration, and risk-taking. Furthermore, it is a process that requires a willingness to fail and learn from mistakes. And most important, It’s a process that requires leadership.

I feel that living in a world where we listen to other people’s opinions rather than doing the data analysts and thinking ourselves has led many organizations to outsource their most significant strategic asset—brain power—to agencies, consultancy companies and technology giants.

Mindlessness

It started with Six Sigma, Design Thinking, Big Data, God-forbid, Agile and the rest of the buzzwords swap. The global economy spent billions implanting methodology after methodology just to be able to look cool. Really, why the hell marketing departments need to implement agile? Oh, McKinsey said we need it, so it must be true.

Those ideas didn’t just infect the global executives’ mindset, but they also altered the meaning of innovation. It shifted from being a creature of creativity, curiosity, and exploration to yet another corporate process, driven by bureaucracy and mindlessness. The global business community acceptance of this behavioral code made it almost impossible to think in terms of transformative innovation, where corporate culture is driven by intellectual greed and manipulation rather by collaborations and partnerships.

We allowed external forces to occupy the intellectual landscape of our corporate realty, ignoring the brain power under our noses. We invested in external companies and agencies while neglecting to invest in our employees.

Now, where are you facing yet another shift in the way we run our businesses – Artificial Inelegance. Now, many people think we have passed the point of no return. That ChatGPT is capable of doing magic. I keep seeing these headlines repeatedly. It’s wrong. The point of no return has not passed!

Perspective, please!

AI what?

The learning models of these AI technologies are not bast of all of humanity’s accumulative knowledge, but rather on a very small set of carefully curated data, and by curated I really mean biased. In a neutral world, if you’ll try to replace 40 engineers with a system such as ChatGPT, you will simply get a system that is capable of repurposing, copying, reusing past knowledge to do more or less what the engineers you got rid of did. Oh, minus their ability to imagine. But since we do not live in a neutral world, replacing 40 engineers with ChatGPT will give you engineering solutions that are aligned with woke thinking rather than with your company’s needs. Do you think I’m pushing it now? Good! At least I made you uncomfortable to think for yourself.

Tips for innovation

Aric Dromi

Aric Dromi's mission is simple: to encourage society to question the narratives through which we experience our world, and to use that mass of critical thinking to enable conversations that will elicit the change that will better prepare humanity for the enormous challenges that lie ahead. His work and research areas are designed to offer strategic insights with a focus on illustrating areas where technology, policy and societal partnerships will be necessary in order to respond to constant changes in our world.Aric currently resides in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. He is the founder and CEO of TEMPUS.MOTU GROUP (www.tempusmotu.com)