An idea campaign may be a great idea—and there are some great technologies available to help you launch and administer one. But it’s just as important to launch an innovation culture campaign. One that will help your people better understand how to think and work creatively.
With innovation, the odds favor the gambler. The longer you play, the more likely you are to win. Each calculated risk that fails, if carefully evaluated and used to learn, brings us closer to a successful solution, by teaching us what won’t work and hinting at what does. It’s those who stop gambling, who fail to experiment long enough and often enough, who give up too soon, who lose.
Anyone can become a successful innovator, but some of us are more predisposed to creative change than others. Ironically, companies tend to stack the deck against their own innovation efforts by predominantly hiring those who are most conformist and most competent at doing what’s already being done, rather than those who embrace new ideas.
In science, there’s always another question. No matter how many questions a good researcher answers, or how much data is gathered, there are always more things to ask. In fact, there seems to be a geometric relationship between answers and questions, with each answer prompting multiple new questions. Richer, more subtle, more complex questions. Sometimes [...]
What would it do to your company to have to ask permission from the government before anything could change? Yet isn’t that what large corporations routinely require of business units and employees? Do you think maybe it has the same effect?
Life is not a multiple-choice test and neither is business. The insights we need are not found in brief lists of options. Knowing what worked last time isn’t the same as knowing how to face a new challenge or find a new solution. It doesn’t give someone the courage to experiment, or the confidence to chart a new path. Indeed, the surest way to short circuit innovative thinking is to conclude that you already have the answer.
Are you creating the sort of innovation-friendly environment that generates and implements attractive ideas? You need to be, because the ability to become a source of great new ideas is your most critical business asset—in the insight economy.
Even after years of breaking down silos and decentralizing decision-making, most organizations still cling to the organizational chart. It’s perhaps flatter but it’s still there. So maybe we still need it. If that’s true, let me humbly suggest that at the very least it’s time to turn it upside down.
There is no shortage of research on creativity, what it is, how to cultivate it, and how to integrate it into our schools’ curriculum. It certainly needs to entail much more than teaching students to be “artistic.” We probably have some sorting out to do to determine what approaches will be most beneficial, but let’s at least start sorting.
Many verbs have been put in front of the word innovation, words like foster, promote, enhance, generate, cultivate, improve and imbed. They show up frequently in the literature and I’ve used them many times myself. However one word that I rarely see coupled with innovation in this way is one that I’ve come to realize [...]