What exactly is innovation? How can we innovate? As an aspiring entrepreneur, these questions have always baffled me for a long time. As Peter Thiel says in his famous book, "Zero to One", future is a state where things are different from the present. So how can we reach that state? Thiel further elaborates that the future can be reached only through changes - horizontal changes and vertical changes. Horizontal changes take place when we travel from one to n – that is just by copying the existing things. Whether vertical changes take place when we travel from zero to one - building something out of nothing. The onus is on entrepreneurs to envision the unknown, to build the future out of oblivion.
The journey from zero to one is the toughest where technology acts as the primary agent. Technology essentially means a new way of doing things. Thus to change a set of processes, we need to first see things from different perspectives and then execute them differently. But it is easier said than done! From childhood, our perceptions get heavily influenced by our surroundings. We see the world through our hugely relative lens. What we see we accept it as true. Now to get over this bias and seeing things from a different viewpoint is a huge challenge. To do so, we need to first accept that what we see and what we think may not be right. The way we do a particular thing is not ultimate. We should let go of our rigidity. How much it seems certain, there are always better ways of doing a particular thing. It might be out of our imagination because of our limited view of the world. But technology is the thing which can make those impossible things possible. Without all the impossible becoming possible, no progress would have happened for human civilization. Existing processes are not always right - and it can always be improved. We should have little respect for those set processes, disregard for status quo and should be daring enough to question unconventional wisdom. As shown in the famous “Think Different” video by Apple, changemakers are rebels, they are troublesome, they are round pegs in square holes.
Unless we understand this fact that how the present state of things binds us, we cannot innovate. Innovation is simply letting go of this binding and doing the unknown. It is letting go of our comfort zone of set processes and delving into the uncertain. By only accepting that whatever is convenient is not always right, we can innovate and travel the toughest journey from zero to one.
