Data, Digital, Discovery - the Future of Innovation - Dr Ralph Kerle

Two recent examples show how digital disruption is having a huge impact on traditional businesses and business models and how rapidly innovation as a practice and process will need to change to keep up with the impact. Over the last two years, one of Australia’s largest publicly owned talent management organizations has seen one of its major client’s spend fall from A$30million per annum to $15million per annum, with expectations the total spend year ending 2012 will be around $5million. For any company this is a huge drop in revenue and as the Managing Director said “It is not only a huge drop in revenue for us, it is a huge drop in revenue for the total HR industry in Australia.” This contraction has come about because of the disruption and emergence of digital technology in the HR market, specifically LinkedIn.

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Breaking Through Organizational Impediments To Innovation - an HR Industry Case Study

It has taken a decade for social media to finally deliver on its promise of democratising the work place. We might not have the paperless office but we certainly have free social media that poses a huge problem for the revenue, profitability and very existence of service driven organizations. The problem now for services organizations is not when to change but what to and how. This means organizational innovation is no longer an imperative. It is a must do. Yet, organizations find it extremely difficult to implement innovation as it requires strategic, tactical and behavioural change and to align those elements can be an Herculean task. This difficulty was highlighted recently when I was invited to a meeting with the MD of one of Asia-Pacific’s leading HR services companies. The MD has responsibility across all divisions for revenue, is passionate about innovation and recognizes the HR market is changing rapidly

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How to Make a Region Innovative - Booz&Co

A great new paper from Booz&Co on how to foster economic growth via innovation clusters that need to draw on the power of an interrelated “quad” of sectors: public, private, civil, and academic.

Download the full paper here.

Innovation Hell: Saving Good Ideas From Premature Death - Visualised | Fast Company

Why is it that so many ideas grow weaker in the process that is theoretically designed to bring them to life? It's a painful but true phenomena (also, a very bad indicator of a company culture, if your goal is to survive and not become yesterday's news). Innovation is the heaven and hell of every brand’s journey. Inspired insight and passion fuel innovation’s potential, while committees have the wonderful legacy of killing potential greatness faster than a roomful of politicians. Or worse, a committee of politicians.

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Creativity Lessons from Charles Dickens and Steve Jobs - Anne Kreamer - Harvard Business Review

Creativity is the most essential skill for navigating an increasingly complex world — or so said 1,500 CEOs across 60 countries in a recent survey by IBM. And yet federally funded research and development — creativity, institutionalized — is down 20% as a share of America's GDP since the late 1980s. Private R&D spending has also tailed off since then, when it brought us breakthrough innovations like laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface, and the mouse. And that was just from one company's private R&D engine, Xerox's PARC. At the same time, experts fret that our public school system doesn't foster enough creativity in our future workforce. All of which makes it easy to worry that we'll run out of creative leaders producing creative goods. But I think the declinism is overwrought. And that's because some of the best paths to encourage innovation are surprisingly simple.

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