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I confess--I am an innovator. This being "Innovation and Strategy" month at Paperitalo Publications, my confession may be a good place to start. Having just come from the 6th Annual Light Green Machine Institute Conference at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point adds positively to the mix. This conference likely covers the most innovative subjects in our industry because I steer its content and that is what I seek.

Innovation makes the world go around and, further, as a human satisfier, keeps life from being boring. However, innovation has its problems, both from the practitioner and the manager perspectives.

If you are a manager charged with innovation advancement your task is difficult. The first problem is where to find the seeds of innovation and the second is to select which seeds to water, fertilize and protect. Early in the innovation process, it can be exceedingly difficult to discern which ideas to take forward and which to discard. In the practical world, you are going to have to water and fertilize all the seeds to a certain point, which means you are going to waste money on those which you eventually discard. The temptation is not to waste money, but to be too stingy too early is to run the risk of killing some really great ideas.

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As an innovator, the frustration is equally palpable. My personal experience is that people will mock your ideas until they are proven to be winners and then, overnight, their next action is to steal them. My wife used to read trade publications in our industry. She would point out stories or announcements to me and say, "Look, they used your idea!" She thought that was flattery, I thought it to be another example of thievery. She stopped doing this after she saw my reaction.

I think there have been two and only two really great innovators since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The first is Thomas Edison. The second is Steve Jobs. Now, did they discover the science behind their innovations? No. But they turned science discovered by others into practical innovation everyone on the planet uses every day.

Without Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs the world would be as follows. There would be no electric lights, music industry, film industry, personal computers, extremely smart phones and on and on and on. You are affected by the innovations of these two and only these two individuals from the moment you wake up in the morning until well after you go to bed at night.

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Thus our title, "Elusive Innovation," for out of all the individuals who have been born since Thomas Edison (11 Feb 1847), literally billions and billions of people, only two have affected you to the extent these two have. Real innovation is elusive.

I like to think we are innovative here at Paperitalo Publications. We have very innovative message delivery and content coverage--I would dare say the most innovative in the pulp and paper industry worldwide. Yet, as I tell our staff, there is a fine line between being unique and being weird. And for all persons who observe us, their fine lines between unique and weird are uniquely their own. Still, we soldier on for many reasons, including a mission to bring this industry into the 21st Century, help advertisers find more efficient ways to deliver their message and simply because it is a lot of fun. We are grateful that you are along for the ride. No quiz this week, we are giving you a break.

For safety this week, one of the greatest safety innovations we have seen in a long time was the topic of the last presentation at the Light Green Machine Institute Conference. This was likely the first presentation on this subject anywhere in our industry: a presentation on the use of drones. Drones are going to radically improve the safety aspects of our industry, from their ability to inspect high altitude matters without sending a human into space, to allowing us to inspect items that were not easily inspected before.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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