There is something to be said for daily routines. The action that you are participating in is unconscious. It is a part of you. As long as this action is healthy, positive and beneficial to others – forming this habit is generally considered to be a good thing.
But… do daily habits affect innovation? If you’re doing the same thing every day, can you really be an influencer in change?
Innovation is thought to be caused by a random spark of ingenuity that drives a person to immense genius. Issac Newton discovered how gravity worked by sitting under an apple tree. When an apple fell, he just “got it.” The apple fell. So what brought that apple down? It has to be a force.
This applies in the corporate world as well. Marc Benioff conceived Salesforce when he was swimming with the dolphins in Hawaii. He had an epiphany that enterprise applications could follow a similar model as successful consumer applications like Amazon and Ebay.
These epiphanies are things of legend. These breakthroughs weren’t discovered amid a daily routine. They were conceived in nature – just chilling. Naturally, we should assume that “just chilling” is the way to formulate the best ideas in the world.
But the only way for these epiphanies to occur at all was because of the inventors’ consistent lifestyle. Newton was studying the moon with great detail when he witnessed the apple falling. Primarily, he was trying to figure out why the moon would rotate around the earth. Why wouldn’t it just fly away? Why did it go around instead of away? The apple falling may have been the catalyst of his invention – but it wasn’t the whole story.
Benioff’s story is unsurprisingly similar. In the era before the massive Salesforce towers crowding SF and NYC, he worked for 13 years at Oracle. There he studied how clients utilize enterprise software. His trip to Hawaii was a great way to break away from his day to day at Oracle and think through the concept of an enterprise software cloud. But the ideas only occurred because of his routine.
Therefore I propose that consistency is a vital factor in innovation. Or simply stated: Innovation = Habits + Free Time.
The challenge is in finding balance.