I recently completed two sister courses from the MIT Executive Program centered round innovation – The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering Five Skills For Disruptive Innovation and Innovation Ecosystems: A New Approach to Accelerating Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
The courses were both great, and for any physician or healthcare executive bitten by the “Innovation Bug”, I strongly recommend them. But even if you choose not to take these courses, here’s one important thing I learned from them: a working, meaningful definition of innovation.
After many discussions within the MIT community, (and recognizing that the each of their thousands of innovators has a unique definition for innovation), a consensus organizational definition was developed:
Innovation is the process of taking ideas from perception to impact.
Bottom line – innovation isn’t a product, or a technique, or something new. It is a process – something active and living.