Innovate to stay competitive - a speech

Sharing my recent speech on how to use simple thoughts to innovate and stay competitive.

Speech Transcript:

It was the award night ceremony at our company. I was tense and nervous because along with 4 others, I was nominated for the coveted best manager of the year award. Five of us were close colleagues and sat on the same table eagerly waiting for the announcement. Everyone wished good luck to each other wearing their best smiles. Finally, the announcement was made and I was not the winner. The winner lifted the trophy amidst rapturous applause while we, the 4 losers drowned ourselves in copious amount of whisky at a pub. After drinking, all losers suddenly became best friends, we blamed the system and shared with each other how we felt from the bottom of our heart that one of us should have been the winner.

Later, I realized…..on that day we completely missed one point – the winner did things differently, he was an innovator.

Today I will discuss why innovation is no more just a “good to do” thing….but innovation is a must to stay competitive.

Why is innovation so necessary to stay competitive?

Because, more and more people are getting good education, there’s an explosion of free access to information, people are becoming more ambitious resulting in a situation where most of the things are equal among individuals……except the ability to innovate also called divergent thinking.

Now, Let us find out what should we do to innovate…

First let us understand the difference between creativity and innovation. Most of the time we use the words interchangeably but they are different. Creativity is the raw thought or idea that comes without being logical whereas innovation is the implementation of the idea and bringing it to a logical conclusion.

Mankind is designed to think creatively. Researchers believe that an average person gets around 50 to 70000 thoughts per day. I believe there are 3 primary kinds of thoughts – What, Why and How, most of the time we get “what” thoughts – for example…

What are the new concepts?

What is my role?

These thoughts are also triggers for creativity.  

The “why” thoughts are of two types – “bad why” and “good why”. Bad whys are all the negative thoughts…..for example….

“Why my salary is lesser than his?”

“Why should I do so much work?”

“Why my boss is not happy with me?”

But the “good whys” makes you challenge the obvious and helps your mind to explore. For example…

“Why do we always do it manually when this can be automated?”

“Why I am not losing weight even after dieting?”

We also get “How” thoughts – they are rare but these thoughts helps us analyze. We should always try to invoke this thought. For example…

“How can I improve sales?”

“How can I write better?”

“How can I reach my goal?”

You must have noticed that in all the examples I have used the word “I” because thoughts are always your own. For example….If your subordinate is coming late to office, you get a thought “Why is he coming late?” but once you ask the question to your subordinate “why are you late?” then it is no more a thought, it’s an action. We don’t want action during the idea generation stage. Just open the window of your mind and let the ideas come in freely.

Once you have generated enough ideas, you can start testing them to give shape to your innovation.

To sum up - encourage yourself to think, nurture the positive thoughts and stay competitive.

Remember, the sunshine you see was created millions of years ago in the sun’s core, it took millions of years for the sunshine to travel from the core to the surface of the sun and it reaches you in just 8 minutes.

Start preparing yourself and one day you will become the shining star.