It's really simple: to innovate, focus on learning. Everything else will follow.

There's a lot more to innovation than can be captured in lists of "10 Things to Do" or "5 Things Not to Do."  They work for somebody else.  Great, thanks for sharing.  But what is going to work for you?

In fact, most of these lists obscure the key point which is to set your business up for learning.

To figure it out, start at the beginning.  Start with the most basic thing you can do: focus on learning.

• Am I learning something? Or am I doing the same thing over and over?
• Am I learning something? Or am I spending energy invalidating data that contradicts what "I think?"
• Am I learning something? Or am I only hiring people who fit the mold? (Y'know, the non-threatening types.)
• Am I learning something? Or am I still dealing with my customers the same way I did last year and the year before that?
• Am I learning something? Or …

Whatever the situation, ask: is there an opportunity to learn something here? Or can I do it in a way so that I can learn something? Am I thinking too hard and taking too long before trying out an experiment to learn something?

Keep It Simple

Focus on the learning angle and you'll be fine. Learning leads naturally to innovation.

As you focus on learning, you'll find yourself looking at your plans from a different angle: am I building a little, incremental improvement for my product that's not teaching me or my customers anything new? When I am done building it, what am I going to learn from the exercise?

If the answer is "no, I am not going to learn anything from this," then don't do it.  Do something different.

Or change it so you can learn something from it.

YABA? (Yet Another Bunch of Admonitions)

To make this post more than yet another bunch of admonitions, in lieu of data and studies, I offer you a list of proven practices, all based squarely on the learning cycle,

• Scrum, XP and the rest of the Agile Development methodologies are all about creating software based on a series of single-purpose, easy-to-understand stories and short development cycles. Scrum specifically includes retrospectives to learn from the current cycle and figure out what can be done better in the next cycle.
• Customer Development, Steve Blank's great contribution, is all about "get out of your office" and learn from the people you'd like to call customers.  Find the folks who've already experimented with other solutions and can show you where the bones are buried, so to speak.  Oh, and do this as a series of short cycles until you figure out what your "great idea" turns out to be.
• In fact, one of Steve student's, Eric Ries put together Agile Development and Customer Development in practice to create a very successful company, IMVU.  He renamed this combination the Lean Startup, now a popular movement among investors and entrepreneurs.
• The New How, by Nilofer Merchant, describes how to create business strategies that really work. It describes a process of, guess what, short cycles to generate maximum learning throughout the organization.
• The US military has for years been using John Boyd's OODA Loop, the granddaddy of them all: Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.  The most visible "success story" of the OODA Loop in practice is Desert Storm, the early 90s war with Iraq (i.e., not the current mess) which was fought and won in 100 hours. The Loop works because of multiple feedback cycles, but in particular the Orient (and re-orient and re-orient and…) cycle is all about learning from the facts at hand.

One More Time: Keep it Simple, Focus on Learning

Focusing on learning will guide you to develop processes that keep you on true north to innovation.

Once you get a good handle on this, you, too, can write a list of "10 Things" that work for you and become a popular #innovation blogger.