Unlocking Creativity and Value: What Is Innovation In Business?

What is innovation exactly? With about 4,100,000,000 search results in Google, a clear-cut answer becomes a little elusive.

I prefer to sidestep jargon wherever possible. From my experience, it doesn’t have to be a complicated concept. Think of innovation as any change which adds value.

There are intricacies and nuances to innovation, of course, and we’re about to explore it all. 

• Innovation is any change that adds value. We’re not just talking mega inventions. Even small tweaks like reorganising your inbox or adjusting your wake-up time is innovation if it improves your efficiency or enjoyment of life.
• Both incremental and disruptive innovation matters. Small, steady improvements (incremental) and game-changing shifts (disruptive) both have their place, and they often complement each other.
• Create a culture of psychological safety to encourage innovation. Leaders should celebrate experimentation within teams, welcome feedback, ask “How could we do this better?”, and avoid using stifling language like “No” or “But”.
• Avoid “innovation theatre” and focus on real, sustained action. Superficial events, like one-off brainstorms or idea contests without follow-through, don’t work. Innovation must be embedded as continuous, supported behaviour across an organisation.
• Use micro‑experiments and clear KPIs to build and measure innovation. Try small-scale tests to learn and iterate quickly. It’s also helpful to measure innovation by tracking time spent ideating, revenue from new improvements, and the number of ideas that become actual projects.

Innovation brings to mind Tesla cars and VR headsets. It conjures up images of satellites edging closer to the sun and submarines sinking further into the depths.

However, I challenge you to think about the more minimal, incremental shifts, too.

But what is incremental innovation exactly?

It looks like reimagining your inbox folders to cut down on wasted time; getting curious about removing a distracting app from your phone’s home screen; testing out a new meeting time to see if you get better quality participation.

Inventing the wheel was a change that added value, yes – but so was shifting your wake-up time from 8am to 7am.

With these nuances in mind, here is the definition I’ll lead with as we navigate through the rest of the page:

Innovation is any change which adds value. It is any change that helps us respond to our changing surroundings, and it is something we are all responsible for. Where scarcity keeps us stagnant, innovation gives us choices, options, and flexibility.

Change, as we know, is constant. It may be the only true constant we can rely on.

What does that mean for us? Ultimately, it means we need to be prepared for change as it comes and embrace it when it arrives. Innovation gives us the flexibility to move with the changing times.

Without it, we humans wouldn’t be here at all…

From our very beginnings, people have been innovators by nature. It’s how we moved from those early hunter-gatherer days to the thriving, technologically advanced civilisation we exist in today.

Take a look at some of our earliest innovators:

There are obviously thousands upon thousands of innovations, small and large, we have to thank for the lives we enjoy today. So, is innovation important? It’s more than important – it is essential to our survival as people.

Change happens constantly in business and it’s difficult to predict. Looking back on the past ten years – even the past five – blows me away in terms of the changes we’ve witnessed:

Did we see any of this coming? Maybe we predicted some of it, but it’s near impossible to know just how quickly these things will evolve – and advancements like AI have completely outstripped predictions.

All this to say, change will happen in ways we cannot predict or control. It’s best to be ready for anything by taking an innovation-forward approach.

Consistent innovation helps us remain responsive to changing trends, client expectations, technological advancements, and frameworks. Businesses that make innovation part of their culture are the ones who find themselves ahead of the curve.

The definition I outlined at the beginning still applies for business innovation: any change which adds value. In this particular case, it means any change which adds value to your clients, your employees, your bottom line, or your broader community.

It’s helpful to think of business innovation as two different types: incremental (constant improvement) or disruptive (game changer). Let’s zoom in on each of these.

Incremental innovation is any small, gradual change that contributes to a greater positive shift – like increasing the number of WFH days to see whether productivity improves, or experimenting with different meeting durations to find the ideal timeframe.

Take the iPhone. Its first iteration was enormously disruptive (we’ll get to that in a minute), but Apple’s innovation has continued through every upgrade since its release. Continual updates to both software and hardware have kept the iPhone at the forefront of the smartphone market.

Incremental improvements are less obvious, but immensely valuable. They create lasting change over time.

These are what you would consider the ‘game changers’ – groundbreaking inventions or ideas that disrupt industries, like the iPhone first generation we mentioned.

On a business level, disruptive innovation might look like releasing a new product with minimal competition or implementing a system that boosts client conversion by 100%.

Rather than tossing up whether to focus on massive disruption or marginal gains, it’s more accurate and helpful to view them as complementary. Disruptive innovations will often be made up of – or followed by – a series of incremental innovations.

Clients are your bread and butter in business. Market saturation can make it difficult to stand out, but there’s a sure-fire way to maintain and expand your client base: innovate.

Aeons of research, like this Genesys report, supports the fact that customer expectations are rising and evolving. Buyers have greater expectations for customer service, personalisation, speed, and accessibility.

As noted by Janelle Dieken for Fast Company, “…the biggest challenge to delivering great customer experiences and meeting those expectations is that consumers are rapidly—and continually—raising them.”

Building innovation into your business equips you to meet and exceed client expectations. Research pieces like this Australian study have found links between innovation-active businesses and greater success, particularly post-COVID when companies were pushed to find creative solutions.

Without a willingness to experiment and implement new solutions, you remain stagnant while clients leave to find better solutions.

A question I’m often asked is how can I encourage innovation at work? How can I get people to come up with new ideas and experiment?

Something we often get wrong here is that innovation can’t be poked and prodded out of a group of people. For innovation to happen at work, it needs to be ingrained in your culture and the way you conduct business.

In other words – you need to create an environment from the ground up where it is commonly known, accepted, and encouraged to experiment, even if the outcome is failure.

So, what’s the recipe for creating an innovation-ready environment?

The unfortunate thing about adults is that we’re all creative, but we don’t all have the confidence to present our ideas. Even those of us who insist we’re “not creative at all!” are innate creators – we just don’t feel able to access that imaginative space.

This reads that being creative is unfortunate – I get where it goes to but it feels like the first part of the sentence is a separate statement,

There’s a quote I love from Tom and David Kelley: “If the scribbling, singing, dancing kindergartner symbolises unfettered creative expression, the awkward teenager represents the opposite: someone who cares—deeply—about what other people think.”

We learn to fear the judgement of others from a very young age. We grow to expect it. For many of us, we develop a perfectionism so strong that our creativity and experimentation becomes blocked.

The challenge for leaders, then, is to create an environment where failure is completely safe and expected. This means:

This reads that being creative is unfortunate – I get where it goes to but it feels like the first part of the sentence is a separate statement,

It only takes one bad experience for an employee to withdraw and develop fear around failure, so psychological safety is an absolute must.

A key performance indicator can do so much more than tell you about your sales. We’re starting to see the value in measuring less obvious metrics. I encourage you to develop KPIs for innovation itself (yes, really).

Measuring innovation with KPIs establishes the practice of innovating as an expectation within your business, rather than some ‘airy fairy’ notion your employees read about in the company mission statement.

Measuring innovation is simpler than you might think, but what is the most commonly used measure for success of innovation efforts?

Tracking these KPIs is, in itself, an innovation that can demonstrate its value to the entire company.

Has a boss or manager ever said something to you that stuck in your head like a tack? We often underestimate the power that words can have.

Language used in the workplace can be incredibly limiting when it comes to innovation. Even small, passing comments can erase all creative confidence for your employees.

‘No’s and ‘But’s should be limited at all costs. We use these without realising and without understanding the impact they have. I personally try to steer clear of them no matter what, because they block so much potential before you’ve even considered the possibilities of an idea.

I recommend that all leaders avoid phrases like:

Notice how all of these phrases use NO and BUT?

Always aim to build on what other people say rather than blocking. Even if you get an idea that is so totally out of left field and unrealistic, challenge yourself to build on it and see where it leads.

If there’s something you should avoid like the plague, it’s an innovation theatre. These are activities that promote innovation in a very performative way with absolutely zero follow-through.

I dislike the innovation theatre for two reasons: it gets no results, and it shows employees that innovation is not a true priority for your business.

You might launch into these events very enthusiastically. Perhaps you run an official brainstorming session, hold an ideas contest, set up an innovation hub, or use all the right inspirational words in your internal comms.

When it comes to action, however, well – there is none. Everything dies down after the initial ‘theatre’ and you return to default processes.

Innovation needs to be a continual process; not a one-time event, and not outsourced or made the responsibility of a particular department and all innovation efforts must be supported and embraced by your executive teams=/s.

Leaders must be aware of the paradigms they have toward encouraging innovation. We’ve all got biases, prejudices, and ingrained ideas that influence the way we approach innovation.

In my book I use the metaphor of a monster – I call him the internal ‘Ogre’. We’ve all got one. This is the inner critic that discourages innovation; he assumes new ideas will probably fail, and anything outside of the norm is bad, disruptive (in a negative sense), or far too risky.

These Ogres may be internal, but they certainly don’t stay inside. They project onto the entire workplace and block creative ideas from coming forth. You’d be surprised at how influential your own paradigms can be, purely based on micro behaviours you display without realising it.

All leaders need to do internal work on dispelling these Ogres. To expect great things from employees, we need to demonstrate innovative behaviours – experimenting, asking for feedback, and breaking our attachment to old systems or processes.

The boat is safest in the harbour – but that’s not what it was built for.

Experimentation and taking risks is the only real way to make progress. The alternative is to stick with what’s safe and never take a chance on greater possibilities.

Even so, you don’t always need to conduct complex, disruptive experiments to make progress.

I recommend making a habit of micro experimentation: “…small-scale tests conducted to explore and validate ideas and strategies within our organisations.” A/B testing is a great example of this – trialling two different email campaigns to see which performs better, for instance, or two iterations of a landing page.

Another example might be testing out a new agenda for your weekly standup meetings to see whether the quality of contributions improves. It’s a tiny change, but the results can be enormously fruitful.

Micro experiments have all kinds of benefits. You can:

You lose nothing by experimenting on this micro scale, but you stand to gain a lot through the data and discoveries you make.

“Creativity is the ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems and produce novel value.” – Dr Natalie Nixon
Innovation thrives on creativity, and creativity drives the process and output of innovation.

While breakthroughs are often associated with factors like scientific thinking, knowledge, and experience, creativity remains a fundamental part of any innovative endeavour.

Being creative in this context is finding new ways to look at problems and bring about solutions – so it’s a requirement for any kind of innovation, whether you’re solving an equation or inventing the wheel.

And, despite popular belief, creativity isn’t reserved for the paintbrush-wielders or avid writers…

“Creativity is not just for the arts—it’s a universal capability, fundamental to every discipline and field.” – Sir Ken Robinson

A misconception I often come across is people thinking they aren’t creative because they don’t participate in the arts. “I’m not creative, I can’t draw! I don’t know how to paint! I’m a terrible writer.”

The truth is, creativity goes far beyond the arts. Art is only a small component of the potential outcomes of creativity. If you have a brain, you’re creative.

Try to reframe creativity not as something artists have, but as something we can all discover and embrace – including you. Your capacity to innovate starts when you acknowledge your own creativity and begin tapping into it.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong – the wise words of Joseph Chilton Pearce.

As I mentioned earlier, we all grow up with a sense that failure leads to doom and gloom. It’s no wonder that the majority of us exhibit perfectionist traits.

Perfection is innovation’s enemy, though. The notion of ‘perfect’ strangles us. It villainises mistakes, errors, and failure, convincing us that it’s better to avoid these things at the cost of progression.

When you’re trying something new, things don’t always go to plan, and this is a normal part of innovation. Failure – or the possibility of failure – is something we need to acquaint ourselves with in order to innovate.

So, what’s the link between problem solving and innovation? The two are closely intertwined. Innovation comes about through finding creative solutions to your problems.

The path to solve a problem creatively is never linear. It’s a process of iteration, experimentation, and viewing a problem from many different angles to find the right approach.

The first release of a product we see on the shelves is never the first model the inventors came up with. There are stages upon stages of prototyping, repairing, improving, and going back to the drawing board.

Each time this happens, innovation is taking place in order to solve design problems and reach a polished final product.

Have you heard or used the term ‘design thinking’? It’s one of those phrases you can easily gloss over or assume the meaning of. Design thinking and creative problem solving aren’t interchangeable, though they are closely linked.

Problem-solving defines a problem and its cause, identifies possible solutions, and implements a solution. Design thinking is one innovative approach to problem solving that puts the ‘user’ – humans – at the heart of the challenge.

According to the Interaction Design Foundation, design thinking has a few stages: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Putting empathy at the forefront is what sets this approach apart from other traditional problem solving methods.

Essentially – design thinking breathes life into the problem solving process.

The exciting part is that design thinking is built to tackle the more abstract and ambiguous challenges; we can take the methods that designers have used to solve problems for many years and apply those principles to social and human issues.

Bring design thinking into your organisation with one of my workshops – I’d love to collaborate.

We’ve covered a lot here – thanks for sticking it out ‘till the end. Humans have been creatives and innovators since the beginning of time, and that’s what I really want to mail home; we’re all capable of bringing about valuable change.

Many of you will be applying these concepts to the workplace, where innovation has received a lot of attention over the past five years or so. Keep away from performative brainstorms and buzzwords and focus on building innovation into your KPIs, culture, and personal values. That’s how innovation grows in the workplace.

I made the connection with creativity because at the crux of everything, creativity gives us the power to innovate – you can’t create valuable change without it. Perhaps one of the toughest battles will be with your inner critic and perfectionist, the Ogre, who will try to convince you that innovation is futile. Banish the Ogre!

Zooming out, innovation isn’t just a conversation about improving your company’s bottom line. Design thinking – an innovative approach to problem solving – gives us the power to solve broader social issues, an ability we can use now more than ever.

If these concepts pique your curiosity, there’s plenty more where it came from. I poured my passion for this subject into a book; it’s called A Thousand Little Lightbulbs and it’s your complete guide to kickstarting a culture of innovation. Business as usual is not business as usual.

Read it here, and in the meantime – happy innovating!

Still curious? Read on for answers to your commonly-asked questions.