Innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. If you forget people’s concerns and feelings when you present an innovation, or neglect to understand their perspectives in your design, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
Interpretation
Innovative ideas are often dismissed not for their value but for the emotions they evoke in others.
Scott Berkun emphasizes that when presenting innovative ideas, it's crucial to consider the emotional responses of others. Innovations can be technically sound yet still face rejection if they fail to resonate with people or acknowledge their feelings and perspectives, which can lead to failure in implementation. Understanding and addressing emotional aspects is as important as the practical merits of an idea.
In practice
In a business meeting discussing a new product, this quote can be used to stress the importance of customer feedback.
There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn’t one.
In Israel, a land lacking in natural resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: our minds. Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology.
If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
Companies over-emphasize idea generation and under-emphasize idea execution when it comes to innovation.
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