Making Innovation Part of Everyday Life

By: Karin Wall

This week InnovationManagement spoke with Jorge Barba, innovation insurgent, blogger and Creative Strategist at the San Diego based Digital Marketing Firm Blu Maya. Read on to learn more about his experiences challenging the status quo and promoting innovation as a human process to a better tomorrow.

What is innovation management to you?

Whether it’s satisfying customer’s existing needs in a new way or completely surprising them with something they’d never imagine they needed, to me innovation management is simply a systematic process of creating new products and services that deliver superior value to a market.
And to better meet these challenges, this process takes into account the external changes in world and marketplace as well as the internal changes the organization has to make to be able to adapt to change.

What’s the most satisfying part of your job?

There are a few things that I enjoy and that is constant learning, collaboration, risk and surprise. Innovation and constant learning go hand in hand so the learning part comes easy for me as I’m constantly ingesting knowledge from different domains and this helps keep me on the edge.

I also get a lot of pleasure when I help a client by simply helping them do something that to them seems impossible. I see this as a small step to convincing them that doing things differently isn’t that difficult because most of the time the smallest details added up make the difference.

Another thing I like about my job is collaborating with people with different backgrounds and interests. To learn from and to be a part of a group of people that come together, connect their collective minds and work for the same purpose is exciting for me. It’s beautiful to experience and to watch.

And the last thing I like is that if all of the above happens, if you innovate, you might just change the world. I love risk and to innovate is to work in uncertainty. It’s less about predicting the future and more about creating it. And this is fun for me.

And the most frustrating parts?

Human nature because we humans don’t like change and so we tend to become defenders of the status quo. And that’s the frustrating part because it’s human to conform to how things are and not challenge them and believe that there’s a better way.

In the world of business this is even more pronounced because the job people have is a stake in their futures, and risking that is not something they get enthusiastic about.

This takes patience and understanding, luckily I’m very passionate about change and so very much welcome the challenge.

What’s your next big challenge?

My big challenge is changing the perception that innovation can be done by only a few people with special skills. It’s also important to me to shift the belief that innovation is entirely a business process because it’s really a human process to a better tomorrow, we just have to realize that we’ve been doing it since the day we discovered fire.

It is my belief that the more we talk about innovation in the context of everyday life and not just business, the better off we’ll be in the long run because people will become familiar with it before they join the workforce or set out to create their own business.