Innovation is in the Eye of the Beholder

In an earlier post about being innovative everyday, I  used some examples of how some simple problems could become catalysts for innovation. Often in many shops a change of perspective and team work can get a lot accomplished.

However another thing to keep in mind is the power of perspective. Often times what technical folks consider "not a very big thing" is actually quite innovative. Generally speaking I find that less experienced technical professionals tend to overlook or downplay their achievements. A couple of cases that I have seen that illustrate my point:

• In an all Java shop, an engineer creates outside of Java a framework that allows for dynamic provisioning of services complete with versioning, tracking, dashboards, automation, and self-service in an automated fashion that is cross platform and fast. Initially the engineer did not think much of their solution, however their solution so impressed with the framework and the architectural vision behind that approach such that it became a key component for the company's offering.
• In a large enterprise that favored purchasing vendor solutions, a group of young and eager college students created a Java-based server that handled hundreds of millions of transactions a day with larger ordering and provisioning systems with minimal cost in terms of hardware. Their solution included custom tools such as telnet clients and queue maintenance screens, workflow, customizable parameters via xml, prioritization and scheduling, as well as failover and recovery. They even honed their deliverable to include some great screens, reports, dashboards, and performance monitors. Not bad for a group of 2-3 programmers from college. Their entire server was very scalable capable of handling significant growth starting from a mere 10M requests a week and growing in 3yrs to handling over 200M a day. All of it ran on only 4 quad-core Intel-based Linux servers. To the several business and internal technology leaders their product was quite inspirational. Yet to these programmers, they thought of their solution in a more humble manner often times referring to their achievement as "no big thing". 

In both cases the technical professionals noticed problems, determined how to tackle them, implemented them, had tremendous impacts to their organizations, and were ultimately very humble about their results.

I am certain many organizations have at least several individuals that fit this category. Often times such achievements are recognized not by the individuals who actually delivered them, but rather the business that relies on them.

What I tend to find is that such a trait of humility is both a blessing and curse. Such talented individuals tend to find themselves in challenging roles but not necessarily fulfilling ones. After all even the most talented individual wants the freedom to grow and expand, which may or may not be alignment with their current organization. However it is during transitions that such talent finds challenges since they are not always presenting their accomplishments in the best light. Sometimes they appear potentially too arrogant, other times too timid.

In the long run, such talented individuals will always find their way not because they necessarily the value or not in their innovative ideas, rather that from their perspective being innovative in their solutions is the only way they operate.