Resources for Innovation – The Power of Constraints

The wise stewardship of resources is the task of any organization. How those resources are deployed for maximum gain is the key responsibility of organizational leadership. The only problem with this concept is what happens when wise stewardship comes up hard against the necessary risking of resources for the material benefit of innovation? Unfortunately, in the present “economic unpleasantness” as a dear friend keeps calling the train wreck that is this great recession, stewardship of resources has digressed to hoarding of resources. Save for one notable exception – human resources.

Innovation Is Not Clockwork – The Challenges of Innovation Systems

A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without the aim, there is no system. – W. Edward Deming
Ignoring the interconnections between organizational subsystems causes havoc when innovation is demanded of all areas of the business, instead of one function, and the competition for resources becomes fierce.

Working The Processes of Innovation – Learning to Love & Live Failure

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
To create innovation there must be a structure that can support the exploration, the risk-taking, the resource expenditure without direct monetary return. A structure that supports innovation must capture and support an organization’s ability to reach beyond what it produces in the present to what it might produce for the future. It demands a structure that can seek and use unknown resources, to build the unknown for unknown customers (or at least meet current customers’ unknown needs!)

Innovation Economies & The Benefit Of Creative Destruction

Today innovation sits at the heart of economic value creation. If the 1980’s were all about productivity, the 1990’s were about quality, and the 2000’s about globalization, the current decade will most likely be about the capacity of organization to harness the controlled chaos inherent in innovation to create value. With the acceleration of globalization process, innovation is more and more seen as the appropriate tool to create business value.

Bill Gates’ 2010 Annual Letter focuses on Innovation

Gates: This is my second annual letter. The focus of this year’s letter is innovation and how it can make the difference between a bleak future and a bright one.
2009 was the first year my full-time work was as co-chair of the foundation, along with Melinda and my dad. It’s been an incredible year and [...]

Innovation Is Not A Strategy

Why Blue Sky Thinking Does Not A Blue Ocean Make
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
- Sun Tzu

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other
The confused merging of strategy (specifically strategy formulation) and innovation in business circles is alarming. Both strategic thinking and thinking about [...]

Want to Improve Your Innovation Culture? – Start by understanding organizational culture

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass-you don’t see it, but somehow it does something.
- Hans Magnus Enzensberger
What is Organizational Culture?
At its most basic, organizational culture is reflects the “personality” of the organization. Culture is the combination of the held assumptions, espoused values, practiced norms and physical artifacts of organization members [...]

Eyes on the Prize – In a CoIN a flexible approach to changing conditions means more wins

In his fascinating research on collaborative innovation Peter Gloor, a Research Scientist at MIT’s Sloan School for Management Center for Collective Intelligence, identified a model he termed CoIN for, Collaborative Innovation Networks. He first named this model in the popular press in his book, Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks. His stated goal [...]

Measuring Successful Innovation – It’s not about the Benjamins*

Now we’ve got around seven thousand people working, and that to me is fantastically satisfying.. more than dollars and cents, because I just believe that the greatest thing you can give someone is a job.
- Janet Holmes à Court (one of Australia’s richest business people)
I was having a conversation over lunch recently about ways to [...]

Innovation Trapped – Rethinking the flow of ideas to market

I think we do need to move very swiftly in creating value for consumers and reacting to the economics.
- Brian Becker
On BusinessWeek’s website recently (November 9, 2009), Vivek Wadhwa posted a ViewPoint column focused on the implication of globally outsourced innovation. While what he reviewed was not necessarily earth-shattering in its revelations it did highlight [...]