Today’s Love Letter to Innovation

If we study history, we probably know what to do to get out of this economic morass. And the Dow’s recent rebound notwithstanding it isn’t just to feel good about compromising on taxes. It is to take the high ground and long road of investing in innovation. Listening to Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and Robert Hormats, of the US State Department, they went on to repeat and repeat and repeat their acknowledgment of the many forms of Innovation as “the answer” as they talked today about the economy ahead on the January 2 Wall Street Journal Report.

It would thrill me to no end to hear these very grounded guys down on bended knee sending a love letter to Innovation writ large. If, that is, I didn’t know just how hard it is to actually pull off and create innovation. There are many hurdles…perhaps the biggest are the twin dogs at the gates: will and imagination. It’s not ideas. We even love the idea of innovation. And god knows we love the i-life world that Apple has innovated for us. We KNOW what to do, don’t we? We know the church. But we don’t as a culture seem to know how to push open those doors, get past the dogs and get in there and do the work. It feels like a cognitive gap called Knowing-Doing. It’s not about praying. It’s about the skills and practices and tactics and the sheer sustained will to innovate. In this year’s blog posts I am going to relentlessly focus on examples of real and remarkable innovation at all levels- and the remarkable relationships that sustain them — with the hope that if we can see it show it we can help make it more real. In the meantime, there are 400,000 jobs (says Andrew Ross Sorkin) to create a month to get Americans out of the hole, and a decade worth of inspiration to help us start it up courtesy of this Maria Bartiromo interview…so watch it and tell me if you heard this beautiful a love letter to our economy, and our collective national soul: it’s time. Time to innovate.

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Julie Anixter is Chief Innovation Officer at Maga Design, a visual information mapping company based in Washington, DC.