Last month I blogged about how to look at the world with curiosity.

Why is this also important for a business? Let’s look at a business that is NOT curious. It gains no new knowledge and there is no innovation, which will lead to decline and eventually ‘extinction’. Darwin showed this to us a long time ago in the evolutionary sense and it also applies to companies. Many get stuck with what they do well and eventually fail because they are not sufficiently curious.

Knut Haanaes discusses this in his TED talk below.

Knut’s presentation stresses the importance of finding the right balance between ‘explore & exploit’. A successful business invests the returns from exploiting its current knowledge into exploring new knowledge. In other words, the company spends money to gain knowledge (explore) and uses the new knowledge to make more money (exploit). And repeat, forever…

The innate driver to explore and gain new knowledge is of course curiosity! Hence, curiosity is not just beneficial for you as a person but essential for the long term prosperity of your business.

How do you inspire people to be curious in your business? First and foremost, your business needs to provide a psychologically safe environment for people to explore in. They should not be afraid to fail when asked to move from exploit to explore. Yet another balancing act in itself…

– Frank, CEO –