Why Innovation Matters – A very personal perspective

Whilst I’m relatively “touchy feely”, I’m sure that I have always been slightly wary of people who have “over shared” in order to make their point.

So, at the risk of being a walking cliché and “over sharing” I want to take the remaining space in this blog to talk about a source of my ongoing passion for Innovation.

For the last 6 years, I and my immediate family and friends have all had front row seats to observe, (fairly helplessly), the slow and pernicious deterioration in my Mum’s mental capacities as she succumbs to ever deeper levels of Alzheimer’s. 

For those not familiar with Alzheimer’s it is currently an incurable disease of the nervous system that slowly strips away from its sufferers the ability to remember the details of life whilst often simultaneously gifting them with low grade paranoia, an inability to initiate activities, crankiness, aggressiveness and social inappropriateness.  Due to the nature of the disease it is not unusual for a sufferer, to not only lose themselves, but to also damage the key relationships they had worked so hard to build up during their lives leaving them truly isolated and alone. What is particularly scary is that 1 in 3 of us will die whilst suffering from some level of Alzheimer’s

So what does all this have to do with my ongoing passion for Innovation? Well, when you watch someone you care about lose, piece by piece, all that matters to them it doesn’t half give you a reminder that life is to be lived today and more than anything else, it is the quality rather than the quantity of that life that really matters.  So what I really love doing is working with people who look to innovate, not only to improve the quantity of their profits but to improve the quality of the lives of their customers, employees and communities.  It takes no more than 10 seconds of reflection on my Mum’s situation (she started showing signs of Alzheimer’s in her early 60’s) to remember and remind myself that life is just too short.  It’s too short not to celebrate and encourage those researchers and innovators who work to make life better – I thank you.  It’s too short to do anything other than pour myself out to improve the way people work and live. That, for me, is time well spent.  Innovation should not merely be about “clever financial engineering to maximise profit” – it should be about the application of our passion, intellect and humanity to wrestle with and overcome life’s big problems.

Thank you for having the grace to have read this far in what reads like a very cheesy blog – not sure how else I could have written it.  More pacey blog to follow next week.