Inspiration Drives Innovation #NZCS50

children at a lemonade stand

A guest post from Litmos Founder, Rich Chetwynd.

Over the past couple of days I have been attending a conference in Rotorua celebrating the New Zealand Computer Society‘s 50th year. The focus of the conference is innovation and there have been some amazing examples of companies and organizations in New Zealand doing really innovative things over the past 50 years.

What seems to be a recurring theme is that education is the key driver for innovation and while I do agree that education is extremely important, I really feel people have skipped over the social or more ‘touchy feely’ things that can be catalysts for innovation.

I’d like to propose that inspiration is a key driver for innovation and here’s why. In most cases people both young and old have heroes, mentors or people that they follow or aspire to be like. That aspiration leads to dreams. If you have a dream then you are naturally driven and inspired to make that dream happen and it’s that inspiration that people use to set about coming up with ways to bring their dreams to fruition – in other words, they innovate 😉

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this concept. What do you think, does inspiration lead to innovation?