Innovating

Society celebrates innovation after the fact. It is a revisionist exercise, and little is said about how to innovate. Aspiring innovators are told to get a big idea and a team and build a show-and-tell for potential investors. But that conflates innovation, entrepreneurship, publicizing an idea, and fundraising; it does not clue aspiring innovators on how to begin. Innovating shows how actually to get started and innovate for impact and scale—a skill you can practice and master through learning. It is a doer’s approach for the explorers of our time, developed over a decade at MIT and internationally in workshops, classes, and companies. It shows innovating does not require an earth-shattering idea; indeed, no thing is new at the outset of what we only later celebrate as innovation. It takes only a hunch, and anyone can do it. By prototyping a problem and learning by being wrong, innovating can be scaled up to make an impact. The process is empirical, experimental, nonlinear, and incremental: give a hunch the structure of a problem; use anything as a part; accrue other people’s knowledge and skills in the course of innovating; systematize what is learned; advocate, communicate, scale up, manage innovating continuously, and document. Questions outlined in the book help innovators think in new ways. It is even possible to create a kit for innovating.