How Innovation Naturally Emerges From Deliberate Inefficiency

“The fact is that most companies are structured to maximize efficiency and minimize risk, resulting in an environment that ultimately prevents meaningful innovations,” explains Elliott Parker, author of the new book, The Illusion of Innovation.

Adopting inefficiency, experimentation, and messiness as a strategy sounds counterintuitive, but Parker – backed by 25 years’ experience working with Fortune 50 companies – proves it’s necessary for progress.

“The hard truth is there is no formula for innovation success because every innovation is new and every organization unique. The only reliable pattern is that inspiration often comes from unexpected places,” shares Parker.

He further maintains that we need scaled corporations to recover their problem-solving capacity. “This means questioning decades of embedded assumptions about why corporations exist and finding ways to run faster, cheaper, and weirder experiments. It's time to build again,” says Parker.

Some of the book’s key takeaways and learnings for me are:

In an environment of rapid change, what feels safe is counterintuitively risky.
Thriving companies are deliberatively messy, not sterile.
Seek novelty to create strategic optionality.
Change is hard, but not changing is much harder.

Finally, Parker explains that creativity results from collisions, from taking an idea from one context and applying it to another. “And often, the further you look outside your immediate context, the more likely your mind is to be stretched to find creative solutions,” adds Parker.

The book is a compelling guide for leaders who want to discover creative approaches for innovating.

Parker is the founder and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, a venture builder that partners with corporations, universities, and entrepreneurs to co-create startups.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

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