Episode 1: Innovators vs. innovations – Where should we focus?

[Pamela Spokes]

Welcome to the Innovators at work podcast. We are both experts and explorers in the areas of service, design, innovation, culture, and entrepreneurial thinking. We want to break down these buzz-wordy concepts to make them approachable and usable for everyone. We believe that everyone can be an innovator in their own work

[Juha Järvinen]

In this episode, we will be looking closer at innovations versus innovators, people versus outcomes. These two things are different but connected. I am Juha Järvinen and I am here today with my Metropolian colleague and co-host, Pamela Spokes.

[Pamela Spokes]

So, today’s episode is called Innovators versus Innovations, Where Should We Focus? So, Juha here is Metropolia’s, Innovation Specialist. And so, I think he’s the perfect person to answer. How are innovations created?

[Juha Järvinen]

So, many people think that innovations are created by chance, and most of us know the Disney character Gyro Gearloose who has this lamp blinking over his head. You know he’s getting great idea and it’s a good start to have great ideas but some people mix [confuse] that ideas are actually innovations. Ideas are a good start, but we need substance around that. So, something that puts it into practice and that might even lead to something that is inventive enough that we can talk about inventions. And this is something also that people mix with each other is that they mix that an idea is invention. We’re not touching the issue of patenting today. That’s a different topic, but basically, some inventions that are technically enough [new] material can be patented as well, but we also need a general how to utilize. The only idea that has had some substance around it and after that we can talk about innovations. So, innovations are basically ideas that have some concrete outcome and that have some value to society or whoever is utilizing them.

[Pamela Spokes]
OK, so it sounds to me that kind of innovations are the outcome of a much longer process

[Juha Järvinen]

Exactly.

[Pamela Spokes]

So, if innovations are the outcome of a process, then who are the people that are actually doing these innovations?

[Juha Järvinen]

Innovators are basically coming from people who are curious, who are willing to try something new. They are the ones that go into things with their open mind and who are ready to experiment. And this isn’t the mindset that many people actually have. So, repetition in the outcome, moving on to the next thing on the list, is far more comfortable for most people. Peter Drucker, the guy who is often called the father of modern management, knows that innovation isn’t just about having a brilliant idea. It is about systematically looking for opportunities.

[Pamela Spokes]

OK. That’s really interesting. So, systematically looking for opportunities, that’s actually a skill that can be taught and learned. So, you know this is why I think you know, both companies and universities should be focusing on more and more innovators rather than innovations. For the most part, today, only those who naturally have these skills are really able to utilize them, but it isn’t actually impossible to learn more of these skills. So, it is just as valuable to nurture these skills and more people so that we can get more innovations than it is to recognize the innovations that are already happening.

[Juha Järvinen]

So, how is it possible to create an ecosystem where individuals feel empowered to innovate?

[Pamela Spokes]

Yeah, that’s very interesting because as we said, you know, it’s super important to be able to educate people to the point where they feel comfortable actually being involved in innovation. And so in order to do that, for me, I think you have to have a lot of open education that everyone can access and you give them opportunities to explore what the different elements of innovation actually are. Many of these skills are the same as what we call the entrepreneurial mindset, so these are things such as creativity, searching for opportunities, which is what we just spoke about, teamwork, critical thinking, flexibility, problem solving, etc. So, there’s a lot of different skills that are involved in creating people who feel comfortable to innovate. So, this reminds me of Hal Gregersen, he’s a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, and he wrote a book called The Innovator’s DNA, and he identified 5 key discovery skills that innovators should have in order to be successful.

And the first one is called Associating, and this is really where people can connect ideas, connect problems with solutions, see things beyond what’s in front of them, and they’re also able to kind of connect different fields together. That can often for other people, feel totally unrelated.

The next key discovery skill is Questioning, asking a lot of questions to get to the heart of a matter much faster. They literally ask the question why a lot or what would happen if etc. So, there’s a questioning of everything that’s going on around them, why somebody would do something. What would happen if I press this button? What would happen if we redesigned this? These are different ways of questioning everything around you.

And the next one, the third one is Observation. Looking at the world around them, the people around them gaining insights and new ideas. So, really just putting a lot of time and effort into observing what’s going on around you.

The 4th one is Networking, so really actively searching for new ideas and new people and reaching out to them to see what it is that they know, who they know, if they’re interested in working with them. All kinds of different ways you can network.

And then the final key skill that he talks about is Experimentation, this idea that you’re constantly trying new things and exploring the capabilities and boundaries of things around you. Always seeking and willing to try anything that you think might work, never allowing what has happened in the past to hold them back from trying again in different conditions. I think this is something where many of us get stuck. We sit in meetings year after year and somebody has the same ideas that came up in the past and we instantly dismiss the idea because we’ve tried it before. But what isn’t recognized is that the conditions for that aren’t necessarily identical to how they have been in the past. What do you think Juha?

[Juha Järvinen]

Yeah, absolutely. And actually looking at this list of Hal Gregersen and it leads us when we’re looking at the product design history of technology. It leads us even back to Henry Ford, because he actually was associating things and connecting ideas, problems and even ready solutions together in order to create a new way of mobility, instead of just producing a new type of motor car. So, he didn’t invent the internal combustion engine or, even conveyor belt production or even the automobile per se, but he connected these three technologies together in a clever way to produce the best obtainable motor car in the world at that time. So, this is clearly this list indicates how it’s possible to innovate when you are actually looking around in the world at what’s happening, and finding new possibilities and asking a lot of questions.

[Pamela Spokes]

So, that’s a really great example that you have there. Of Henry Ford and how he wasn’t actually the inventor of those individual parts, but he was really great at kind of observing things happening around him and associating, connecting these ideas together to solve a problem. So, I think also another really good example. That we can give of these skills comes back to Thomas Edison when he talked about how, you know, he didn’t. He didn’t fail to invent the light bulb the first time or the 10th time or the 100th time, he just found 10,000 different ways that didn’t work. So, you could see that he was really kind of questioning what he was doing, asking himself these questions, following through, testing them out, experimenting, and seeing if they worked or not. Do you have any good examples?

[Juha Järvinen]

Yeah, exactly came into my mind that from if we look at the experimenting and more recent example. Is James Dyson, who actually built over 5000? I think 5127 different prototypes before he could get his bagless vacuum cleaner concept working. So, he really was doing hard time with his experimentation. But he had also the passion to make the solution work.

[Pamela Spokes]

I can only imagine how much space that took up, all those different prototypes that he made.

[Juha Järvinen]

Exactly, yeah. (laughing)

[Pamela Spokes]

But if we bring it back to what we’re discussing here today, which is, you know, innovators versus innovations and also, of course the title of this podcast, which is innovators at work, we all want to be more innovative. So, it’s important for us in general to know how we can incorporate these skills into our everyday work as well.

[Juha Järvinen]

Absolutely, yeah. And everyone can be innovative at their daily work. So, this is not something a privilege that is reserved for the few, but you can be innovative. I can be innovative. Our colleagues are innovative. We’re all innovative. If we just keep our eyes open. And when we come back to Hal Gregersen’s list you just previously presented, observation I think is one of the keywords. Looking at the world around you and finding out recognizing a problem that requires solving. That’s the kind of a starting point due to any good innovation process.

[Pamela Spokes]

So, the heart of innovation, what we’re saying is basically it’s the first step in recognizing a problem that needs solving, and this uses these you know, association, questioning, observation, these three skills.

[Juha Järvinen]

Yes, and then building around those good ideas, and that’s the good start for any good innovation process.

[Pamela Spokes]

Yes. And I think these innovation processes within organizations need to have a place to happen. But one of the stereotypes that comes up is that, you know, some organizations they already have somme kind of lab or some kind of place where innovation is supposed to happen or can happen, and these are usually quite exclusive spaces where certain rules don’t apply. Certain KPIs don’t apply and people are given the autonomy to just try things. And that’s, you know, that’s great. But the problem with these is oftentimes they are quite exclusive. They don’t allow everybody to come in and use them. They don’t allow everybody to interact in a way that would allow them the time to think innovatively and to act in this way. So, one of the things that I have really been looking to start here at Metropolia is this idea of an innovators lab or innovator school or something like that whereby absolutely anybody who needs to exercise these skills, learn these skills can come along and we will have, you know, hands on courses where they can practice these skills and these are also the skills like we talked about with the entrepreneurial mindset, this creativity, different kinds of prototyping. Because many people within Metropolia are creating services that need innovation. They need to be innovative to be more effective and people are noticing the problems in their own work here and it would be really great to be able to give them the tools that they need in order to be more innovative in their work. So, how about other spaces Juha?

[Juha Järvinen]

Yeah, that’s actually what you described. That helps us to negate the usual stereotypes of the inventors or innovators that are working, the kind of the mad scientist image imagery or for persons who work in the basement or somewhere in the special laboratory and do some work in some very special things. Because innovation is for everyone and, for example, in our university, this is filled with creative people. So, we really need to give them opportunities and possibilities to exercise their skills, and this is not only the question of plainly creating new ideas, new innovations even or inventions, whatever we would like to call them. But it’s also a question of utilizing resource resources wisely because, after all, we are working here for the benefit of the society.

[Pamela Spokes]

Yeah. And what better way to help society than by creating more people who can be innovative and so creating more innovators?

[Juha Järvinen]

Indeed, exactly.

[Pamela Spokes]

I think it is actually important when we think about this space, where we can help to foster innovation and foster people who are more innovator-like, that we think about the networking part. So, one of the key skills was networking. And in this space, as long as it’s open to everybody, we are able to kind of foster this networking aspect to it so we can bring together people who work in entirely different parts of the university, and we can have them work on things that affect their work, affect other people’s work. We often are working in these silos and it can really affect the decisions that we make and how we see things that are being developed, because if we don’t see the effect of a decision that we make further down the line in a students journey, it can be really causing actual problems for other people when we don’t have this broader perspective. So, this takes us nicely to our, you know, kind of next topic, which is talking about the future of work, really important to students here at the university, but also to everybody here who is already in their working life. And the skills that we’re going to need are changing and changing rapidly, so I think it’s very interesting here. This list that the World Economic Forum has put out this list of core skills in their 2025 report. And notwithstanding AI, which is of course a much bigger topic than we can deal with here and I certainly don’t have the answers. Do you? (laughing)

[Juha Järvinen]

Me neither. Not yet.

[Pamela Spokes]

Not yet. But looking at this list, they give out 10 skills and five of those 10 actually are in the realm of kind of innovative thinking or entrepreneurial thinking. All of these different things that require us to work in a certain way, so the five that I can think about now are analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, creative thinking, empathy and active listening, curiosity, and lifelong learning. So, a lot of these have to do with what we’ve been talking about here, even in these five key skills.

[Juha Järvinen]

Yeah, true. And of course, all these skills have been around forever and they have been something that they are important to everyone in the previous working life as well. But now when the world is getting more and more immaterial and more intangible, we need more creativity. More innovativeness in order to, for example, understand the world around this. For example, taking the point #7 empathy and active loosening, that’s what we need more and more. You mentioned AI that is not probably going to take our workplaces. But it’s going to be a tool that we can utilize instead of it’s taking our places and taking our empathy our way of actively listening, and that’s why these kind of lists are very important in order to be the innovator of the future or. Not even in the far future, but in the coming years.

[Pamela Spokes]

So, this will guide how we train our staff, how we teach the students, how we engage with them and what we’re looking to build in the future.

[Juha Järvinen]

Yeah and some of the ways here in Metropolia University of Applied Sciences for students, we have the great possibility for the students to enhance their creativity by participating in Metropolia Minno project, which is of course a part of their basic studies. A10-credit course where they work with real challenges, with real companies and organizations and that’s one way of building their future careers as well, because they can, after they have completed Minno they have, probably created new ideas that can be used also for their future entrepreneurship endeavors. So, they can participate in Turbiini activities which is our campus incubator program. We’re going to discuss that later on in the.

[Pamela Spokes]

Yes. And from my perspective, one of the best ways that both our staff and our students can learn innovation skills and enhance these is to take part in one of the innovation challenges that we have. We offer these, you know, once, twice, sometimes three times a year. And you know these are kind of intensive learning events that will give everybody a quick baptism-by-fire experience in these innovation skills. I mean that actually takes us quite nicely into our next episode and that will be specifically about innovation events and what we do here at Metropolia and ones that happen in our broader U!REKA network, so stay tuned and come back for that episode. Thank you for listening today to the innovators at Work Podcast. So, this episode covered many issues and if you take nothing else with you, please take away these three key points: #1 innovation skills are learnable. #2 mindset is more important than outcomes. And #3 understanding that everyone can be an innovator if an ecosystem supports it, and that these skills are highly transferable; innovation skills and mindsets will never be wasted. Join us next time for another episode of Innovators at work.