Innovation killer

Innovations get rejected when they are not well presented. Innovation killing can be said to be the situation whereby good ideas get dropped; sometimes for dumb and awful ones. This sometimes happen when the innovator won’t lick the shoes of the project leaders or s/he won’t submit to herd mentality on the project team. Rejection of ideas and innovation can be minimized when we develop the art and the science of presentation.

Another way is to be able to identify ahead of time what makes the people on your project team excited. If you want any idea to really have great impact. Tie it around sensitive issues. Look out for the emotional part, political aspects, or religious aspects of the society. Wrap the innovation around the most defining moments. Or tie the invention around diseases like cancer, HIV/Aids, Swine Flu, et.al. You can also tie the idea around celebrity. Tie it with gossip. Think of life and death. Make a big deal out of it and elucidate why it is a matter of life and death.

Some example of how to tie ideas and innovation around causes are as follows: You can start a cause that may be in favor of some victims of pollution in industrial sites, safety concerns, factory injured people, people who are unjustly punished, and soldiers who fell in war front and how to help liberate their families. Proposals for project such as these will sell. Move the cause farther by amplifying, elaborating and exaggerating the importance of such cause. Make media noise concerning it. Advertise it. Make the Government pay for it by registering it as a non profit business. You can then get donation from people all over the world.

The root for your innovation may be far apart from the cause but in a way try to tie them together so that it won’t get killed. Once dissociation, divergence are observed or done to the idea; it is as good as a killed invention even before it is introduced. Once you are able to tie the ideas together in such a way that they are inseparable; you will get funding, sponsor, grants, et.al for it.

Another way is to wrap your invention or idea, around history, gender, politics, race, religion, historical sites, heritage, sensitive culture, et.al. This is one of the ways to save your idea or innovation from getting killed by critics. Tie that idea around people’s emotion. Tie it around repressed and depressed minds. Tie it upon the oppressed groups who are searching for meaning. Tie it on the vagabonds who are waiting to escalate. They can be equally used. You can use their energies. Redirect their passions. Ride upon their negative anger by positively turning them around, do a reorientation for them and engage them in a more noble cause.

A leader must be able to motivate the entire team. A leader must be able to move his people to corporate action. For instance, look at the case of Holocaust. Could it be that Adolf Hitler was smart enough to be able to do all what he did to the Jews because he was able to work on people’s minds? He was able to use their emotion for his own greed? There's a way to tap and use some silent energy in people. Locate those repressed passion, those shut off anger and unearth them. That may be one certain principle used in Germany to mobilize those Nazis against the Jews?

Nations, businesses, families and individuals need to prevent innovation killings. Their bright ideas can only be realized if they are ready to protect their invention come what may. You can't afford to watch innovation killed wherever you find yourself. That is why it is not a bad idea to desire to be a part of leadership of any organization you may find yourself. Leadership determines if an innovation, idea will be killed, snuffed out, quenched, or not.

I’ve seen organizations where their leaders don’t have the required skills, strategies, or understand how systems can be built or run. Worst still, Ideas and gifting of the ordinary members, employees are even shunned. The bridge to move the organization forward is consequently cut off. Their visions get stuck and the organization cannot move to the next level because of pride in leadership. It is so amazing how much we can achieve together, individually, corporately once we set personal ego aside. Once we realize that this is beyond us, pride will not stop us from reaching our corporate goals.

Rather than stooping to conquer, I have seen leaders walk away from the people carrying the required solution. Sometimes those gifted people may even be on their very team. Yet they prefer to outsource for "the right person" and thereby missing on opportunities. Due to fear of losing control, supervisors, leaders, managers have stuck to their guns and refuted the idea of change. Sometimes, best practices in guise of innovation are put forward by colleagues in an organization but due to office rivalry. They are rejected. This is an art of Innovation killing.

When leaders are afraid of losing control; they are forced to hold on to traditions, old methods, obsolete systems, outdated information and principles that had been proven inefficient and ineffective. The outcome is not far fetched. It is gross failure. The clue is to allow freedom of expression, cooperation amongst team members...Instead of wearing uniforms or dressing strictly formal; some organizations usually wear business casual dress code just to break such stringent barriers and bureaucracy things as protocols and inability to socialize and solve corporate problems easily and as quickly as they arise. And your organization will skyrocket immediately.