Innovation! is the rallying cry of brands, businesses, orgs, and causes today.

One cannot flick through their LinkedIn feed more than a few posts without seeing some kind of content about Innovation.

At the same time, our culture – especially consumer culture – wants authenticity.

Yet that which is authentic tends to come from longevity: doing the same thing or making the same thing the same way, reliably, for a long time.

So there should be tension between innovation and authenticity, right? The classic tension between the old and the new.

To sort this out, Jon Hirst is our guest on the Brand Shepherd Podcast.

Jon is the Chief Innovation Officer for SIL International, an org that “works with local communities to develop language solutions that expand possibilities for a better life.”

Did you know that Jon and his team work with 7,000+ languages worldwide and that roughly every 40 days a language dies with the deaths of great-grandparents? So innovation is the tip of the spear for SIL and Jon has the kind of perspective to help us navigate how Innovation and Authenticity work together in a very pragmatic way.

This episode is packed with practical tasks you can do to implement an innovation strategy for your brand, business, org, or cause so be ready to take plenty of notes.