Saturday, May 22, 2010

Children and Innovation

"Why can't we have taxis which fly in the air to beat traffic congestions?"..."Why don't we put up our own Sun in the sky to provide us with light during the night?". Irrational as these statements might sound yet children somehow always have a solution to every issue plaguing our planet! It's only as we grow up that we learn to brand certain problems as unsolvable. Or rather we are taught to accept certain situations and move on. Little do we realize that had inventors from the pages of history not thought as incoherently as these toddlers do, we might still have been living in caves!

We all agree that to survive in this overtly competitive and information leveraged hyper dynamic market, organizations need to 'innovate' continuously. The past decade has in fact seen the word 'innovation' taking a Neil Armstrong like leap from being protectively used as a management jargon to being rebranded as the master key to all organizational issues. In reality though the word has rather been used, misused, overused and at times even abused in every single boardroom meeting. So as we spend billions of $ in framing and implementing (and faltering on most occassions!) innovation programs', let's ask ourselves a grassroot question: What exactly is innovation?

The answer lies in the way we look at things. The way we challenge the status quo. Give a pencil to a grown up and he'll either use it to scribble something or use it as a makeshift ear bud or migght do something even more unparliamentary. But give the same pencil to a three year old and observe carefully. He'll imagine it to be an airplane and fly it with indefatigable vigour for hours on the trot. He'll hold it upright and imagine it to be a skyscraper taller than even those found in Dubai or Taipei. Let him have it for some more time and he'll come up with many possibilities that we grown ups usually categorize as incongruous. This very act of perceiving the unimaginable out of something as mundane as a pencil is innovation. The ability to dream of the unexplored, as unfounded as it might be, is innovation. And didactic as it might sound, let's never forget that it's those amongst these children who retain their irrationality are the ones who're going to be the innovators of tomorrow!