To Innovate, Create "Hunch-Friendly" Environments - HBR

If you want creativity, you need to encourage it, and allow time for it to percolate. That was the focus of this year's Front End of Innovation conference in Boston. Steve Johnson, New Media professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, talked about the importance of creating a "hunch-friendly environment." That is, give your employees the latitude to explore their ideas and you'll be amazed what they come up with. Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, had 10 years of latitude to conceive of the Internet. Researchers from MIT, who were interested in space exploration were given untold amounts of time to track signals from Sputnick, and with that time they changed the future of the world. Their experiments led to current day global positioning systems.

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OECD Innovation Strategy

Just launched, the OECD Innovation Strategy. Download a summary from here. The Creative Leadership Forum would be really interested in your thoughts on its content in particular its recommendations, its outcome, styles and future directions..

The OECD also offers a YouTube Channel containing a series of interviews accompanying the document.

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Using rivalry to spur innovation - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Innovation

Business leaders tend to raise their eyebrows when they read about parallels between history and modern management—and for good reason. There are undoubtedly many people who offer better leadership lessons than Attila the Hun, and it is unclear whether Alexander the Great can tell us much about business strategy. So it’s with some trepidation that we set forth the premise of this article: that the Italian Renaissance was such an extraordinary period of creativity it can shed light on how to stimulate business innovation.

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The Heart of Innovation: 23 Reasons Why Nothing Happens After a Brainstorming Session

How many times have you participated in a brainstorming session, only to be underwhelmed by the utter lack of follow up?

Unfortunately, in most businesses, this is often the norm.

Here's why:

1. The output of the session is underwhelming.

2. No one has taken the time, pre-brainstorm, to consider follow-up.

3. No criteria is established to evaluate the output.

4. No next steps are established at the end of the session.
5. No champions (i.e. process owners) are identified.
6. The champions are not really committed.
7. The champions are committed, but under-estimate the effort.

8. The ideas are too threatening to key stakeholders.
9. No one is accountable for results.

10. The project leader doesn't stay in contact with key players and "out of sight, out of mind" takes over.

11. The "steering committee" takes their hands off the wheel.

12. The next brainstorming session is scheduled too quickly.

13. The output of the session is not documented.

14. No sponsors are on board.

15. Participants' managers are not supportive of the effort

16. It takes too long to document the output of the session.

17. The output is not distributed to stakeholders in a timely way.

18. Participants and stakeholders do not read the output.

19. Bureaucracy and company politics rule the day.

20. Somebody, in the session, is disengaged and sabotages the effort.

21. Teamwork and collaboration is in short supply.

22. Small wins are not celebrated. People lose heart.

23. Participants perceive follow-up as "more work to do" instead of a great opportunity to really make a difference.

Is there anything else we should add?

From Idea Champions blog

Why Government Policy Makers and Academics Are Confused About Innovation

Everywhere innovation has become a buzzword: in academic journals, popular media, corporate promotional materials and government strategies. The use of the word has rapidly expanded from a noun to its various hyphenated transmutations. Thus, today we don’t only talk of the importance of innovation to societies, but often the importance of specific types of innovation too, such as green innovation, social innovation, open-innovation. The innovation jargon has expanded exponentially with colourful analogies ranging from innovation corridors, clusters, poles, and valleys, to “disruptive” , ‘radical’and ‘incremental’ innovations. Not surprisingly then, the average policymaker finds herself lost in the maze of innovation studies jargon. Academics and researchers of innovation have produced a new genre of literature that is difficult to use in order to generate effective (policy) solutions. In fact, little in the way of standard public policy analysis finds its way into innovation policy work and hence too often the political, social, and economic feasibility of many recommendations is not taken into consideration.

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