Innovating doesn’t mean doing something new

I’ve been a big fan of James Gardner‘s work on innovation for a while now. His blog is a great read and his Little Innovation Book is a fantastic run down of the things you need to know.

His new book is going to be called Sidestep and Twist and it’s main point is that the big, impactful innovations are usually improvements or adaptations of existing ideas.

So you don’t need to be first with an idea, you just need to be able to execute well. Think iPod – not the first MP3 player by a long shot, but it was better than the others and made such devices mainstream.

In this video, James gives a really thought provoking thirty minute-odd talk about this idea. It’s well worth watching:

If you can’t see the video, you’ll find it on YouTube.