Regionativo

Innovation per se is a concept heavily tied to research, trial and error, testing, etc, it will most likely take time to evolve and have some usefulness at a point in the future.

Productivity, by definition, is nothing more than a ratio between an input and an output, the more output with the less input the more productivity you get. Pretty simple eh?

So, how these 2 terms relate? Can you be innovative and productive at the same time?

2 relationships appear.

Innovation Productivity

This basically means that you get more innovative ideas (and put them in practice) with less resources to do so. I can think of people such as Thomas Alva Edison with a total of 1093 patents to his name only in the US. The ratio? Give the man one lifetime and he’ll give you enough patents to keep you busy.

Questions arise: How can you measure the input?, the resources required to come up with a bunch of ideas, let alone a good one. What does it take to have an extremely talented innovator? and most importantly, what is the limit in investment for a person (or team) until you decide the ideas they come up with are not going to pay off? In other words, where is the point where you decide the productivity is no longer there? You must reach a threshold where the amount of resources invested is large enough that any innovation will not surpass the cost.

Productivity Innovation

Here the idea is that you can come up with an idea and put it in practice and the result of it will make a company, a person or group of people more productive. Here the list of examples is countless: Robotic assembly lines in the automotive industry, crop harvesting machinery, etc.

Here the ratio is the same, less time to do the same amount of work. A ratio between time and finished products if you will.

SO productivity and innovation are actually tightly related. You definitely want to invest on innovation to come up with methods and technologies that will boost your productivity. But you got to be careful, you can only invest so much until it becomes a loss. In reality there are no linear functions, it all comes to a peak and then is downhill. Innovation and productivity are organic functions, you can only apply so much heat before it burns.

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This post starts some research on innovation and its relation with other business concepts such as leadership, influencing, etc.

It also kicks an interesting research on sources of innovation. Currently there are 2 to my knowledge: Manufacturer innovation and End-user Innovation (term coined by Eric von Hippel), but is that the end of it? After a short thought process I have come up with several other sources of innovation that I would like to put to the test.

Have a great day.