Keep Going: How To Innovate In Difficult Times

If you spend any time in tech, you hear the word “innovation” thrown around like it’s seasoning. We sprinkle it on pitch decks. CEOs say it at all-hands meetings. It’s in taglines, job titles, even company names. But talking with Cris Beswick made it clear: we’ve forgotten what the word actually means.

Cris is a speaker, author, and advisor to people at the top of the corporate food chain. He’s not interested in buzzwords. He’s interested in what works. And what works, he says, is simple: solving real problems. Not imagined ones. Not internal ones. Not the problem your buddy had once at an airport lounge. Actual problems. Felt by actual people. In the wild.

Innovation, to Cris, isn’t an app or a shiny new feature. It’s not even the thing you built. It’s the result—what happens after a team has spent serious time listening, thinking, researching, understanding. It’s the moment a customer says, finally, someone fixed this.