Happy new year, and welcome to www.thinklikeaninnovator.com, a new blog on innovators and innovating that I decided to start. I decided to start this because I think this may be the biggest challenge of our times – how well and how quickly we are coming up with the new solutions to today’s wicked problems. Namely, how to innovate.

I first became fascinated by the challenge of innovating when I worked as a lawyer in Europe through the 1990s and early 2000s doing emerging market work in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. On most projects you not only had to think outside the box, there was no box. The legal systems in countries like Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan were so completely in upheaval that often they had more gaps than relevant rules. Half the challenge, typically, was to design new businesses that would work even if the rules didn’t, while also winning the trust of the local business people who were themselves facing the daunting challenge of transforming from from a state-run society to a free market economy.

Today, with the rapid pace of change and the daunting challenges society faces in this century, we all now face a world of great uncertainty and a need to adapt to unprecedented change.

After reading just about every book on innovation I could get my hands on, it has become clear to me that we need to treat innovation as a real discipline. I thus became fascinated by what it really takes to innovate, or, in other words … how to think like an innovator.

At the same time, it’s also clear that innovating is difficult. If we treat ‘innovation’ as a mere buzzword, we do so at our peril. Innovating presents innumerable obstacles and challenges, and most people have been trained to think they simply are not creative.

I’ve therefore created this blog to begin sharing some of the interviews and insights. I promise I will keep an open mind, listen intently to those who know more than I do, and aim to produce something of value here on these pages.

So … until Friday …

Daniel Gogek