I just got back to the Bay Area from the Corporate Innovation Conference I attended over the weekend. The seminars, the speakers, and the people I met there and the conversations during lunch and dinner was truly inspiring and really got me thinking a lot. I want to share a little about what I have learned about innovation and my take on it.

Before we go any further to talk about innovation, we should ask ourselves, what is innovation? Innovation comes in different form and purpose, some for organization to cut budget, some for trying to come up with ways to improve our world, some for making things more efficient, and some comes from pure inspiring creative ideas. So in another words, through needs, insights and inspiration comes innovations, and many times they are implemented through technology and processes. As we all know it, great innovations create lasting impacts across organizations and companies.

Throughout the conference, I saw different theories and frameworks on how to achieve innovation. These includes the four models of enterprise innovation, the classic desirability, viability, and feasibility diagram for design thinking presented by Sally Madsen during her seminar, and theories like creative destruction and open innovation. These are all useful fundamentals and really set a ground for how to approach innovation, but as some of my colleagues and I was discussing, a lot more is involved for a company to achieve true innovation, especially in a large corporate environment. In the real world, my own experience and this conference, the most important factor for any sort of innovation, especially in corporate innovation, is people.

People affect you in different ways when it comes to innovation. First of all, you need people to support you and your team in order for you to innovate. You need these people, more often or not, your manager or boss, around you to support and aid you through the process of investigating and implementing changes other people and team. You need their support mentally and financially. Without your manager or your boss letting you spend the time on the research and your work, no innovation could’ve been achieved. Besides your boss, you need support from your colleagues as well. Without cooperation from other teams and colleagues, it is impossible to implement changes in a cooperate world.

Second, it is people from outside that gives you insight and help you to find innovations in your much-needed environment and industry. We mentioned before what innovation is, but does it have to be something completely new that no one thought of before? Not exactly. More often then not, an innovation comes from existing models and solutions from one industry and borrowing them and implementing with tweaks into a different industry. I encountered a good example of this while I was at one of the seminar in the conference. A commercial bank in the United Kingdom faced a lot of complaints from customers about long lines in its local branches. Their team was able to identify three sources that faces similar problem including amusement parks and supermarkets. Knowing this, they spend a great deal of time and resources to understand how the companies in those industries resolve them. Taken insights from Disney and Tesco, the company redesigned its teller windows in a circle and implemented “dynamic queuing”, and it helped resolved their problem. That is why people and networks are important. People get their ideas from different people and different industry. Only when one research outside the box and step out of the box and know people outside of the box can they get new ideas and have innovations.

At the same time, it is also people, sometimes companies, that push you toward innovation through competitiveness. Without people putting target on your back, or your team’s back, everyone would be working comfortably without much pressure. With that feeling, why would anyone feel the need for innovation? The same could be applied in a larger scale, in terms of competitiveness between companies. Without competition, Microsoft would never feel the need to improve their products. It is though competitiveness from companies like that of Apple, Google, and open source software do Microsoft found the need to innovate and improve its solutions.

It is people that support you and inspires you to innovate, but also people that block you on the path to innovations. There are always people that tells you not to change, many times because they are in a “comfort zone” and afraid of changes. They afraid that changes would only cause confusion and end up not adding much value to the team or the company. If you want to innovate, you need to step out of that and get support and be creative, and then prove it to them. You need to focus on showing them you’re your changes can create real business value. As I mentioned, without their support, your work and innovation is going nowhere. Take BP’s CTO office’s “Intelligent Push” as an example. The team was able to engaged by not just connecting BP’s business units with emerging technologies, but also articulating the value proposition for BP and demonstrating what the technology could contribute. Validating a technology in a business application was one of the team’s critical values added services. With that, business units were able to see real business values and therefore accepted and welcomed changes from the CTO office team.

So that’s people, and why people play a big part in innovating within a corporate environment. But other then people, remember try to be creative and don’t let anything block you from coming up with new ideas. Never be satisfied and always think of ways to improve. Ideas are everywhere. From people, businesses and technologies. These three things are the source and inspiration of our work.

To end this entry, I want to remind everyone to be ethical when we innovate. Our work should have a positive impact not only to our company, but also to the world.

Desmond Cheung

Fast Company