Getting Down to the Business of Creativity

Business leaders must manage and support creativity just as they would any other asset. Harvard Business School professors Teresa Amabile, Mary Tripsas, and Mukti Khaire discuss where creativity comes from, how entrepreneurs use it, and why innovation is often a team sport. 

Key concepts include:

• People have their best days and do their best work when they are allowed to make progress.
• Whenever a firm introduces a truly novel product, suppliers, complementary producers, distribution channels, and consumers must often develop new capabilities, beliefs, and behaviors for the product to succeed, creating a challenge for the innovator.
• The perception exists that creative businesses can just start up, when in fact it takes a while for an entire ecosystem to actually generate an industry.

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Stop saying 'innovation' - Scott Berkun | The Economist

Einstein, Ford, Picasso and Edison rarely said the word innovation and neither should you. Every Fortune 500 crowd I've said this to laughs and agrees. The abuse of words like innovation, disruption, game changing and breakthrough is killing us. We're tripping over our own egos, lost in the ignorance of romance for the vagaries of pseudo-thinking associated with these words. The more often people in a company use this word, the less likely anything worthy of that label is actually happening, as it's often the confused and the desperate who believe simply saying a word again and again like a magic spell causes anything at all to happen.

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Why CEOs Don't Get Innovation - A Nonsense Article from Stefan Lindegaard and BusinessWeek

I read with interest Business Week entitled why CEO's don't get innovation by Stefan Lindegaard another innovation speaker, network facilitator, and adviser on open innovation and intrapreneurship. He runs all the usual arguments about the inability of organisations to innovate, the spurious argument that leaders now emerging with MBAs are the first with innovation subjects in their degrees (that stat certainly doesn't stack up with our research which is telling us globally universities are failing badly with MBAs, most of whom don't have innovation in their programmes anyway) and summarises with this meaningless statement

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Ideation Success Formula; Eight Suggestions to Improve the Odds - Gregg Fraley

There is a growing industry of consultants and companies (Eureka Ranch, What If!, Ideas to Go, Landis, Research International, Brainjuicer, IDEO, and many more independents like myself ) who specialize in assisting the Fortune 1000 with new product development. They all have different methods – some design oriented, some observational, some with highly structured problem solving methods, others more creative-from-the-gut, but at the end of the day, at some point, they all tend to rely on some form of brainstorming. After all to get to a new product you need a new product idea, and, as they say, they don’t grow on trees. Brainstorming has been around for years of course. Alex Osborn coined the term and wrote the original book on the subject, Applied Imagination. In the USA the term Brainstorming h

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Having Ideas Versus Having a Vision - Harvard Business Review

In the past decade, firms have been praised for ideas. Experts have celebrated the power of brainstorming and idea-generation techniques. Eureka light bulbs have populated the covers of many books. Businessmen have been asked to improve their creative attitudes. And 2009 was named the Year of Creativity and Innovation by the European Union. One consequence of a decade focused on idea generation is ideas are now more easily accessible, which has also made idea generation less of a differentiator in competition than it has traditionally been. When more than 30% of the population belongs to the creative class, as Richard Florida suggested in his 2003 book The Rise of the Creative Class, ideas are not in short supply. And with the diffusion of open innovation processes, ideas competitions, and the like, executives are increasingly exposed to a wealth of ideas.

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