Why hire innovators?

"You snooze, you lose." The two "most obvious" reasons a company innovates are to catch up to a changing industry and market and to gain the upper hand on competitors.

Are these reasons compelling enough for a company to  hire innovators? My biased opinion is no, they should use their internal talent, unless the company is large (economies of scale).

How do you innovate for value

Where does innovation add the most value?

Innovation that addresses an important problem or need adds the most value.

Identifying the importance of the problem that's being solved, if there's a sizable market for a solution, and whether the solution is good and marketable enough to be adopted. You'd be surprised how often that advice is NOT used by innovative companies.

S.M.A.R.T. design for S.T.U.P.I.D. users

This is a very interesting article about good design for users that are stressed, tired, untrained, passive, independent*, and/or distracted (S.T.U.P.I.D.).

How do we address this?

The cliffs note version is to make your design Simple, Memorable, "Accept Autopilot**," Recoverable, and Tested in real life situations.