Earlier today, I stumbled upon a video of Steve Jobs talking about the creation of the humble mouse and why he had to go to David Kelly Designs (which later on became IDEO) to get it done. You can watch the video here.
In the video, he shares that content is more important than process, when it comes to innovation and creativity.
The question is what does he mean by content? He is not talking about the content that we refer to. He is talking about the sum of character, knowledge and the curiosity of the people as their content.
Running a process to enable creative thinking, while important, doesn’t necessarily yield innovations, until, the process is run with people who have the drive, character, knowledge and more importantly the curiosity to explore the problem and be open to new ideas and thinking, as long as it can solve the problem at hand, however improbable or impossible they might seem at the start.
I would posit that having such people (of content), and unleashing them alone is also not enough to result in innovations. As he says at the end, such people might be a pain to manage, simply because of the very same skills and character that makes them so important.
So, in order to deliver innovations, as leaders, leading innovation, we need to staff the innovation process with the right kind of people, allow them to explore and express themselves, while at the same time, set the constraints or the boundaries that they need to play within.
PS: You can also read the brief and the process that IDEO followed to deliver the mouse here.
