Making Innovation Happen
Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 10:13PM Ralph Kerle | Post a Comment Share Article | tagged HR, OD, Performance, Talent, creativity, leadership in Leadership Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:17AM Tucked in an area north of Cincinnati is an office-warehouse building that looks like a movie set. It contains fully functional mockups of two homes (one upper-middle class, one lower-income) complete with kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms. It has two mock grocery stores and a virtual-reality lab where you can fly over store shelves. And, just like a front operation in a spy thriller, the complex is innocuously called BRI Research -- to avoid letting consumers know that they're involved in studies for Procter & Gamble. This is the Beckett Ridge Innovation Center, or BRIC, in P&G parlance. And P&G, whose innovation record has come under growing scrutiny, hopes it can deliver. Analysts and investors are decidedly unimpressed with P&G these days.
Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:03AM 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.
Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 09:53AM Innovation and Creativity are words that are at times used interchangeably in the research and development process, but they have two distinct meanings. While creativity is about coming up with the big idea, innovation is about executing the idea and making it a business success. Do not confuse the two. An organization can certainly have creativity without the right steps to implement innovation.
Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 09:40AM It seems like everywhere you turn (on the internet), there's a thought piece, review or Q&A about Jonah Lehrer's new book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works." The 30-year-old science writer studied sexy examples of creativity (Bob Dylan) as well as unsexy ones (Swiffer) in his quest to understand that mysterious thing called inspiration, and his work seems to have touched a nerve. Now one of Lehrer's most provocative passages -- a defense of frustration as a necessary phase during problem-solving -- has been transformed into a short movie by animator Flash Rosenberg (side note: great animator name!). Which is great, because who doesn't love big thoughts expressed in drawrings? Rosenberg does the animation equivalent of liveblogging to a narration of Lehrer's words, and as expected, the story of Archimedes in the tub makes for righteous visuals.
