Using and Innovating

One of the misconceptions that I see out there about innovation is related to using innovation vs. creating it. Many people will take a new innovative tool, use it and claim that they have innovated. What they have done is very good and admirable, but it is not innovation.

For instance, our Communications team at HCJB Global was one of the early ministries to really embrace YouTube to share videos. That was a good move, but not an innovation. That was using someone else's innovation.

The key to innovation is that you have to take a challenge/opportunity and apply a creative solution. It gets messy because it can look many different ways.

Let me give you another example. While our early use of YouTube was not innovative, we soon realized that the true power of YouTube for a mission agency was not in showing videos from our YouTube Channel as much as it was creating a video repository for our many missionaries/staff to use.

Once we changed our strategy and began to feed video to dozens of blogs, web sites and email campaigns, our use of YouTube became innovative. We had a challenge: How do we help missionaries and departments share what is going on visually? We developed a new solution: Turn our YouTube videos into a repository designed to help missionaries and departments repurpose it for their own audiences.

So as you understand what true innovation is, take the opportunity to stretch your mind and use existing tools to create new solutions for the ministry challenges in front of you.