Innovation. Ownership. Collaboration.

By Sherrie Rohde

It seems that lately the words innovation, ownership and collaboration are cycling through my daily thought process and conversations at a rate that I can barely keep up with.

Innovation

Innovation is our starting place. With social media we’ve created an outlet for emphasizing every disaster, whether it’s a true world catastrophe or lapse in judgment. Instead of looking at the world with this emphasis of pain and failure, let’s look at it through the lens of “How can we make this a better place?” I’m not saying those problems aren’t real, but it’s time we step up and take ownership to be part of the solution.

Ownership

It’s a bit difficult to separate innovation and ownership, but taking innovation to action requires owning the problem and the idea with a commitment to work towards a solution.

The world would look drastically different if we spent more time identifying a problem to own, rather than fighting for more space, more time, or more money in our own little part of the world.
—Lara Galinsky, Harvard Business Review

When we have a sense of ownership, we take pride in that thing we have owned, whether it be an idea or a project or a community. I recently made the decision to identify what I’m passionate about and to learn to say no to projects that didn’t fall under that umbrella. Not only did it make life far less stressful, but it also made it easy to focus on those problems I did choose to own.

Collaboration

There comes a point where we realize that despite our aspiration for innovation and ownership of the problem, we can’t do it by ourselves. And why should we? When we connect with the right people, those whose goals are aligned with ours, our force is stronger and our reach is further.

Let’s work together to make a difference.

Identify a problem to innovate. Take ownership. Collaborate for impact.

Solve big problems.