Unlock Your Potential: 8 Reasons Why Innovation Is Important

Innovation is any change that adds value, regardless of how big or small the change may be. We humans have been innovating from our early hunter-gatherer days; it’s how we evolve as a species and progress as a society.

Just think of the crises and challenges we have managed to overcome – social, financial, environmental – by taking a new approach. I love the simple example of high-rise buildings: we couldn’t build out anymore, so we built up.

It’s easy to see the big-picture perspective of innovation and how it has helped us reach the modern day. We can recognize it in companies like Apple or Amazon, two birthplaces of groundbreaking technology. But where does it fit into your life and your business? Why should you care?

I’m excited to share eight convincing reasons for embracing innovation in your work and personal lives. Let’s get right into it.

You will find that the most successful people have had to innovate many times throughout their careers.

Some would call this a “pivot” – you detect a need for change in your career path, whether it be due to a lack of progression, a lack of purpose, or something else altogether. Innovators find a new opportunity, while others may choose to stay in their comfort zone.

When you dare to step out of that safety zone in order to make important change, this is where true growth takes place. How can you know your potential if you are stuck in a stagnant job that doesn’t excite you? Real growth and progression happen when you take that leap of faith.

We can grow by innovating in our day-to-day lives, too. I am an enormous fan of James Clear’s habit stacking technique he talks about in Atomic Habits:

“One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top.”

Instead of reworking your entire life, you simply choose a habit that already exists and augment it slightly by adding another behaviour to the routine. This is what I call ‘incremental’ innovation – you aren’t necessarily inventing the wheel but making a series of small changes over time that lead to substantial improvements.

The frustrating (but exciting) fact about change is that it’s inevitable. To live is to experience constant change. This is why I so passionately advocate for innovation – because it prepares you to ride any wave and weather any storm.

We see this a lot in business where companies have implemented ‘change management’ strategies. These are essentially pivots or acts of innovation that give the company a better chance of surviving industry change.

For example:

• When Lego almost went bankrupt in 2003 up against too much competition in the toy market, it stopped producing as many new designs and instead collaborated with brands like Disney. You could almost say Lego innovated by being less innovative with its designs and choosing a simpler path to popularity.
• Most people don’t know that Pay-Doh was originally a wallpaper-cleaning product (it’s true) – but when demand dropped, the company made its product more colourful and sold it as a toy.

Kodak is a brand you’ll hear mentioned when talking about innovation, but I honestly see this company as an example of poor change management. They weren’t reactive enough and only embraced the digital revolution after filing for bankruptcy in 2012. While they’re back in business now, the failure to innovate with the changing times left them with a much lower stock market value that isn’t quite recovering.

No one can predict the future with certainty. It’s impossible to know what you’ll be faced with five, ten, or fifty years from now. An innovation-first approach doesn’t give you psychic powers, but it keeps you malleable and flexible, always prepared to find and implement new solutions as challenges arise.

If you’ve ever worked in a lifeless, stagnant company where “old, reliable methods are best” and the most exciting conversation happens around the water cooler, you’ll know what a lack of curiosity looks like. No one is innovating because no one is interested in innovating. Either there is no incentive to do so, or past attempts have been flattened.

Curiosity and creativity are so vital to a thriving workplace, but no one is going to embrace these things without an innovative culture. Leaders need to set the precedent that new ideas are welcome, encouraged, and, most importantly, implemented.

Innovation can bring out the creativity in your personal life, too. Finding efficient ways of doing things – rearranging your schedule, gaining other streams of income, stacking habits – can give you more time for things that spark your creativity.

Over the years, I have witnessed firsthand just how easy it is to fall into a self-confidence rut. Sometimes, it’s a simple case of work taking over your life and pushing out the things that usually bring you confidence. (Let’s be honest – fitness routines and nice-to-have hobbies are the first to go.)

Other times, you might stay in a relationship, friendship, or job that doesn’t encourage you to grow as a person. After a while, there’s no evidence left in your mind to show that you can succeed – so you don’t try. You lose the drive to make progress without even realising it.

There’s research into this exact phenomenon because it’s more common than you might think. Low self-esteem makes us more afraid of negative outcomes. It takes away our confidence to try. Why leave that relationship when you might not find anyone better? Why quit your job if you may not get another?

Fortunately, regaining confidence is as simple as reforming the habit of innovation. Making one small change that adds value to your life can begin the process of restoring your motivation. Over time, you collect more and more evidence for yourself that it’s better to change than remain stagnant.

Ah, perfectionism. Those who live with this burden know how destructive it can be. It’s an intense fear of showing up as anything less than perfect – and since we’re physically incapable of being perfect, life can be a little frustrating for the perfectionist (to put it mildly).

I’ve found throughout my life that the true antidote to perfectionism is putting yourself in the path of danger. You need to be routinely placed in situations where the likelihood of failure is quite high.

No one wants to fail, and in the ideal world, everything would go to plan. But failure challenges us to rethink things. Instead of taking it as a reflection of our abilities, we should respond by going back to the drawing board for a second attempt. “That didn’t work – but something will.”

The more you exercise this muscle, the easier it becomes to try at the risk of failing. We need to be able to do this because most situations in life have an element of risk. Perfectionists, if given the choice, would curl up in a ball of inactivity to avoid potential failure. And that’s not a life anyone should be living.

Probably the most obvious benefit of innovation is that it leads us to better realities. Because of innovation, we have life-saving medicines, hyper-efficient modes of transport, instant communication… the list goes on.

The trick here is that we have to actively innovate in order to get these better outcomes.

Cognitive distortions can lead us to believe life can’t get better than it currently is. We have a fixed mindset because we can only see what’s in front of us right now.

To reach a place where our lives feel fulfilling, we need to make changes that may not have instant results. Change won’t always come overnight. Even if it takes a while to see results, it’s better to take the chance than miss out on the greater, more fulfilling life you could be making for yourself.

While life is arguably ‘better’ for humans now than it has ever been, we are facing a world of problems on all levels. Many countries are in financial ruin, and the entire globe is experiencing a climate crisis.

One thing is certain: the thinking that created our current challenges is not going to be the thinking that solves them. The only way we can possibly hope to overcome our human, societal, ecological, and financial problems is through serious innovation.

Thankfully, we’ve done it before. We have been encountering and tackling problems as a species for thousands of years, which leads into my final point:

Natural selection rules that traits not strong enough to survive will be wiped out, while resilient traits will be passed on, and species will evolve as a result.

We have survived as a species because, like other species, we innovate to increase the likelihood of survival. We made fire to beat the cold. We crafted weapons to hunt more efficiently. We constructed civilisations and societies and formed democracies.

It’s not all raw survival instincts, though. We have the special ability and instinct to find deeper meaning in life. For us, innovation gives us purpose and sparks our creativity. It speaks to our ambition and desire for fulfilment.

Because we innovate, we evolve as a species both emotionally and physically – and this is something we should hold onto at all costs.

The simple reality is that humans aren’t compatible with stagnation. We need to be moving, evolving, and growing – becoming better versions of ourselves and creating better iterations of our tools.

How are you innovating in your day-to-day life? Are you running a change-friendly, innovation-first company? If not, I hope you’ve been able to find some strong evidence here for the merits of creating valuable change. The benefits far outweigh the risks.

Thanks for reading!