What is innovation? This question has become more important and urgent over time, as the problems faced by humanity have become increasingly complex and dangerous. How do we innovate?

There are many definitions of innovation as viewed from different perspectives. The common elements across all definitions produce this general definition:

Innovation is a new, original idea that provides value to humanity.

Examples of innovation across all of human history include fire, the wheel, the printing press, optics, electricity, the internal combustion engine, vaccines, the computer, the Internet, the Web, self-driving cars, Kickstarter, virtual reality, etc.

Technology fuels innovation. Ray Kurzweil’s Technological Singularity suggests that the rate of innovation is increasing at an exponential rate. It’s a good thing too, as the problems we face seem to be increasing at the same rate.

Kurzweil’s Technological Singularity

The Innovation Genome Project

Bill O’Connor, an Innovation Strategist at Autodesk, created the Innovation Genome Project to study past innovations and learn the secrets behind them. Watch this video to hear about it directly from Bill.

Watch Bill’s 2nd video up to 16:04 to learn about LUMIAMI. Open it to full screen.

Have several teams of one to four students brainstorm for 20 minutes, using LUMIAMI, to come up with unique solutions to this Innovation Target:

Adjusting the mission and services of a local grocery store to compete favorably against big grocery chains using an innovative idea.

After 20 minutes of brainstorming, each team should give their best solutions or initiative a name, and write them on idea cards along with a paragraph description, to present to the class.

The class rates each idea on a scale of 1 - 10 for Wildness (wow factor) and Worldliness (feasibility). Ideas are then mapped on Wild World chart. Which ever idea comes closest to 10/10 wins!

Now watch the rest of Bill’s 2nd video.

There are many, many innovation frameworks utilized in business and industry to gain a competitive advantage. Some frameworks have different areas of focus, different goals, different subjects (customer, competitors, markets) or are designed to impact different stages of the product development process. Each of the frameworks shown here in gold boxes can be Googled to learn about them.