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Innovators Lexicon: Novelty

We’re starting a series of posts about innovation terms – The Innovator’s Lexicon. We want to provide easy references that expand & improve people’s vocabulary on the topic of innovation, because words matter and being able to define a thing can really help you do the thing.

NOVELTY refers to newness, to unfamiliar things. Novelty often correlates with excitement, and one of the most common uses of the word is to describe its absence, as in “the novelty wore off and things felt boring.”

Novelty can be viewed as frivolous or gimmicky, like a novelty song. Ice cream trucks sell “novelties.” However, novelty is also a serious legal requirement… Click here to keep reading.

How to be Curious

We talk a lot about the importance of curiosity in innovation and in leadership. “Lean into your curiosity!” “Be more curious than absolutely correct.”

As kids, curiosity came naturally to us. We wondered about things and we voiced those wonders out loud. “If fingers have tips but not toes, why do we say tiptoes but not tipfinger?”* “What does my arm taste like?” “How do we know we aren’t just characters in a book someone is reading?”

*Asked by a real kid we know.

At some point, that curiosity starts to leach out of most of us and we stop voicing the wonders out loud. There are a number of reasons for this, but that is not what this piece is about.

This is about tactics to “lean into curiosity” for those of us who have forgotten/are soverybusy… Click here to keep reading.