The goal of innovation and innovative thinking is of course to make money. The deep empathetic study of the product users’ needs is certainly to provide a worthwhile and possibly world changing solution to their problems but only if it can be done at a profit. All the ideation, collaboration and utilization of cross functional teams must be resulting in a cost savings or a profit making. Better ideas and solutions are a vital part of the long term sustainability of a business if it doesn’t cost more than it produces. The goal is to make money! In Jack Welches book “Winning” he makes it crystal clear that making money is very simply the reason for being in business. If you can make money you can do a lot of great things for mankind but if not you become a drag on society. Making money is what your guiding light for innovation should be. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb to display it in a museum and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were not creating innovative products to stay in the garage, they did it to make money and then to maybe get a shot at changing the world. The best idea in the world is destined to die an obscure death if it cannot be made economically feasible. Understanding how your efforts in any job you perform affect the profit picture of your company is so critical to being able to produce real value. If all you are doing is performing work to accomplish some arbitrary goal set by someone in upper management or if you are doing it as a business owner because that is the measurement the industry uses and you don’t understand how it really affects the profitability of the business then it is time to learn or abandon. There are many who would argue that most workers don’t need to understand how their job affects the profitability of the business but is that the truth or is it just hard to measure the effect of that knowledge? True profit doesn’t come from selling one job but from establishing a track record of adding real value to the customer consistently over time. Sometimes it might be easy to get a little too caught up in the mechanics of innovating and lose sight of the reason you are doing it. To Make Money!
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