Innovate Today! - Transforming Your STEM Career Through Leadership and Innovation - page 132

never do and you're still standing - you may not have fully achieved your goal
but you've acted on what you thought was best, given the concept due diligence
in evaluation, and taken a step to do something that really matters to you. Lerner
suggests two exercises to further claim the victory. The first is to look into a mir-
ror and state your name and the smart risk you've taken followed by what you
have achieved or learned. This should be said many times in a loud and affirm-
ing voice. The second exercise is to identify a family member, colleague, or
professional associate with whom you can “casually” share the fact that you've
taken a smart risk, what you've learned, and how it's benefited you. Finally, at
the point of celebration, find women's networks to provide continued support
and reinforcement as you continue in the path of a risk taker and innovator. Join-
ing organizations such as these will also give you an opportunity to share your
risk-taking experiences and encourage other women to do the same.
Step 6: Don't Stop! Success Breeds Success So Become
a Serial Innovator!
As you grow in your use of the risk-taking process, your comfort level and confi-
dence will increase. Continue to maintain innovation goals. This may be a time to
broaden your risk taking to consider the evaluation of relationships or whether or
not to take on a new community service endeavor. To make sure you keep a fresh
history of your innovation successes, consider putting mementos or reminders
around each of the six steps in your risk-taking projects. These can be emails
you sent to prospective team members, your first (or tenth) rejection letter from
a bank, and any number of other factors. The point is to remind yourself that you
did it, survived it and are thriving but most importantly “you can do it again.”
An Innovation Process: Moving Your Idea Forward!
Now that we've established a process for you to become an innovator, we need
to establish the process to see your idea move into an innovation. Once you rec-
ognize the need and come up with an idea to solve it, the most time-consuming
aspect of innovating will be the process. I've broken down the process into a
few steps adapted from Langdon Morris' “How to Innovate: The Innovation
Process”: [10]
Step 1: Strategic Thinking
The innovation process begins with the goal to create a strategic advantage in
the marketplace. In this stage we think specifically about how innovation is
going to add value to our strategic intents and target the areas where innovation
has the greatest potential to provide strategic advantage. Some important things
to keep in mind during this stage are to think big, and think collaboratively -
who would be good to work with to accomplish these ideas? The result is “Idea
Creation.”