My definition of 'innovative' is providing value to the customer.
Interpretation
Innovation is about delivering value to customers through new ideas or improvements.
Mary Barra emphasizes that true innovation should not only be about technology or creativity but rather the tangible benefits it brings to customers. By defining 'innovative' in terms of customer value, she shifts the focus from merely creating new products to ensuring that those products meet the needs and improve the experiences of the users.
In practice
During a business seminar on innovation, this quote could be shared to highlight the true purpose of innovative efforts.
The biggest message I have for young women is, Don't start cutting off branches of your career tree unnecessarily early. Sometimes women say, I know I want to have a family or play in the local symphony, and they start pulling themselves out of their career path. You don't have to take yourself out of the running before you even start.
My parents were both born and raised in the Depression. They instilled great values about integrity and the importance of hard work, and I've taken that with me to every job.
The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy.
If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach, but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car.
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
Efficiency innovations arise in industries that already exist. They provide existing goods and services at much lower costs. They are not empowering. Efficiency innovators become the low cost providers within an existing framework.
The company's most urgent task is to learn to welcome, beg for, demand - innovation from everyone.
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