“Everything is connected to everything else” according to Leonardo da Vinci. As such, at the beginning of today’s article, let’s leave the world of innovation for a moment to travel back in time to my past experiences in the world of sports.

For over ten years, during my twenties and early thirties, I was a passionate, accomplished middle distance runner. Unfortunately, I started too late with serious running — and probably lacked top talent, too — to make it to the Olympics or represent my home country Germany in a similar top-level competition. However, I had my fair share of successes and championship titles on a smaller scale and even earned myself invitations to some exciting international competitions in New York (four times), Hungary and Portugal.

My relatively strongest discipline on the track was the 3,000m Steeplechase race, where you have to run seven and a half laps on the track and hurdle 4 huge wooden obstacles plus a water pool in every lap. Believe me: 3,000m steeplechase is a grueling discipline. Notwithstanding, I have finished every single 3,000m steeplechase race that I started. One time, I even stumbled over the third last obstacle and tumbled upside down. I knew right away that the accident had cost me a likely medal in this South German Championships race, but I got up again and finished 7th despite having badly injured my knee when hitting the heavy wooden crossbar of the obstacle.

I also tried my hand several times at the less demanding 10,000m distance on the track; while I finished and even won several 10 km races on the road or in cross-country, I somehow never managed to make it to the finishing line of a 10,000m race on the track. I always quit roughly halfway through, saying to myself that I felt bad and wouldn’t win.

As a result: During my running career, I won many championships on a regional level in Germany over 3,000m-steeplechase, and I never won — or even clocked a time — over 10,000 meters on the track.

The lesson from this excursion into my running past is as valid for sport as it is for innovation: “A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.” It’s as simple as that. Success in sports as in innovation requires you to fight against adversity, to hang in when it gets really tough, to never be discouraged. In other words, those who succeed and win in the end are the ones who persist in the face of difficulty and adversity.

An innovator who exemplifies persistence is Thomas Alva Edison, the legendary American inventor who filed over a thousand patents in his lifetime. Edison famously failed over ten thousand times before finding the right design of the light bulb that allowed for a wide commercialization of the invention. Challenged by his contemporaries on this apparent failure, Edison soberly responded: “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And he continued to outline the importance of persistence for accomplishment by adding: “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” How about you? Do you hang in there when the going gets tough and see things through ’til the end? Or do you stop efforts halfway into your project? Are you a winner or a quitter?

Persistence is a critical mindset of innovators and innovative firms. Based on our proprietary THINKERGY X-IDEA Method, let me explain to you how important it is to hang in there and to quit quitting in the critical moments that decide on ultimate innovation success:

• In the X—Xploration Stage, quit quitting and patiently Xplore the underlying background situation of an innovation challenge. Hang in there until you really understand what’s going on and have gained some important novel insights.
• In the creative Stages I—Ideation and D—Development, totally involve yourself for the full length of an ideation or idea development exercise. Don’t stop your efforts to generate or develop ideas before you’ve reached your idea quota — and even once you’ve surpassed it, always continue until the time for an exercise is up. You first need to create a huge pool of raw ideas and then a significant number of meaningful ideas in order to have 1–2 truly great ideas in the end, so every single idea counts and could become a winner.
• Rapid Prototyping is a core activity of Stage E—Evaluation, and it requires lots and lots of iterations, tests and trials. Here quit quitting until, like Edison, you’ve finally uncovered a design that really works and that is widely appreciated by test subjects.
• Last but not least, be persistent to successfully master two critical moments in the final Stage A—Action: Hang in there in the face of rejection and ridicule and continue pitching your idea until you find someone to sponsor the idea. Then once you’ve started the actual idea activation project, quit quitting until your final product is shipped, your new service is launched or your new customer experience is successfully staged. Only after you have crossed the finishing line, pat yourself on the back and celebrate your innovation success.

Conclusion: “The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness,” commented Thomas Edison. So whatever great idea you have in mind, work on or pitch at the moment — hang in there. Stick to it. Be persistent. And to borrow the words of another winner (albeit neither in sport nor innovation), Sir Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never give up.”

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2009. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 24 September 2009.