Motivation: Before I talk about the rules, I want explain why I am very interested in it. I am a research scientist: my job is to generate new ideas, try new things, develop new methods, in the end to create new values. I am also Chinese. Everybody here may already know that in USA, there is a stereotype that Chinese are not good at innovations, if not worse than that. I want to explore how to be more innovative myself to set one more counter example. With the two big reasons, I have spent some time on finding rules/guidelines about how to be innovative. Here are five rules I believe in:
- First of all, you have to have the desire to innovate. You must not be satisfied with something. You must be passionate about something or strongly believe in some causes. Whatever the source of your desire, it has to be genuinely something which can drive you immensely.
- Innovation often means thinking and acting for a relatively longer term goal. This is an intuitive rule since innovation means doing something new, which definitely takes more time than doing something you have done 100 times already. Revolutionary innovations are disruptive. They cannot rely too much on existing things as evolutionary methods can do. But in reality, our work-life is fully occupied with short-term thinking/actions, such as telecons, monthly status report, bugs after bugs and so on. you have to think about the long-term career goals. You can even plan for my two sons. This must be long term enough.
- Innovation means having the courage to take risks. There is a saying: fortune favors the bold. The same is true for innovations. New things do not always work out. The rate of failure is high for innovative adventures. For established people or organizations, they want to maintain their image of being successful so they no longer want to take risky actions. Innovators have to consciously try to step outside of their comfortable zone to take some risks when facing choices and make decisions.
- Don’t try to build on consensus. Innovations mean extremes. A big committee can hardly agree upon on anythings, not to mention agreeing on something radically new and different. To be innovative, you have to believe in yourself, think independently. You definitely need to listen to other opinions, but you must trust your own judgement and critical thinking.
- Finally, innovation means to keep or bring fresh perspective. Again, Often younger people are more innovative than senior people. It is not that senior people can no longer generate new ideas. It often that senior people have developed fixed mentality of doing certain things in their fields. What they know becomes what prevents them from doing something radically different. You should try to keep informed about how other research fields are making progressing so you can have fresh ideas from other research communities.
