Enterprise Magazine Winter 2021

Page 10

You Are Now An Innovator The Three Principles of Innovative Thinking

Our region is full of innovative businesses and organization lead by innovative thinkers. We got in their minds and had them pass that knowledge to you, our readers. By following these principles, everyone can incorporate innovation into everything they do. By Michael Dallas Miller SEDCOR Marketing and Communication Coordinator

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s Americans, we idolize our inventors. We love the risktakers, the adventurers, the people who are willing to head into the unknown to discover or create something totally new and radically different. Lewis and Clark. Alexander Graham Bell. George Washington Carver. Emelia Earheart. Steve Jobs. In our own lives, we all know a tinkerer possessed with an idea and consumed with a passion to bring it life. For us at SEDCOR, we have the immense privilege of meeting those innovative thinkers on a near-daily basis. We get to meet the growers, the manufacturers, the technologists, the machinists, and the entrepreneurs who work tirelessly to run great businesses, update old methods, and create so many products that make all of our lives better. We believe innovative thinkers are made, not born. And that everyone can incorporate innovation into the way they think, speak, and do business.

PRINCIPLE #1: KNOW YOUR PROBLEM Russ Monk and his team at WaterShed have been developing new products for over thirty years from their bright blue building in northeast Salem, many of which have been used and trusted by military and first responders for decades. In the recent era of pandemics and wildfires, they have been working overtime. In 2019, Russ and his team rapidly invented a

8 Enterprise Winter 2021

new material to fill a gap in the Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) market, supplying local hospitals with hundreds of thousands of gowns when few could be found. Then, after the devastating fires in the Santiam Canyon (and all over the West Coast), WaterShed developed and launched their Surge Kits, emergency-preparedness systems designed to be strategically positioned and easily moved wherever they are most needed. More recently, as cities contend with rising homelessness, WaterShed was contracted to build small homes which they call Compact Livables. All of these inventions coming from a company most known for rain jackets. Monk says the first step in creating a new product is to have remarkable clarity on what he calls the “critical needs” of the project. Start, he says, by searching for solutions that already exist. “If you identify those critical needs and you can pull something off the shelve to address those needs, go with that first. If the off-theshelf solution doesn’t tick all the boxes, you now have better context and a good starting point to work from.” “When it is finally time to innovate,” says Monk, “keep it as simple as possible. Don’t invent things that already exists to solve problems you don’t have. Borrow from existing industries— materials, systems, technologies. Sometimes innovation comes simply from applying an existing solution to a novel situation.”

A Region of Innovation


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