Making Innovation Happen
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 09:40AM The Creative Leadership Forum has appointed Grant Crossley as chief executive officer. Grant brings extensive knowledge in the fields of innovation and creativity along with a significant database of contacts. We look forward to learning from his experience.
Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 05:51PM Here is the full text of the speech I gave at the Annual General Meeting of the Australian Services Rountable in Sydney on November 5 launching the Creative Leadership Forum National Research Report"Is Australian management creative and innovative?" To-day the word innovation appears almost daily in the media. There are 360 million references to innovation on Google and on the Google Daily RSS feed I receive notice of new books and articles released daily globally on the topic. Every expert offers a different solution! Every job advertisement talks about the applicant having the need to be creative and innovative. It appears this thing called innovation is a common everyday occurrence. One might be able to talk about it as if it is. In practice, the reality is very different.
Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 05:43PM In the Developing Your Creative Leadership Capabilities programme which the Creative Leadership Forum offers, we always commence the day with a group dialogue based around the question "What is the most creative thing you have done in your life and how did it affect you?" The conversations that evolve out of this question never cease to amaze me, no matter how many times I have conducted this session. Relationships are re-defined by these conversations. People who have worked side by side for decades suddenly discover new things about the person next door they would have never imagined. People begin to see that creativity manifests itself in many guises instead of just the stereotypical view of the creative person as the "arty" type.
Friday, October 10, 2008 at 11:38AM www.newmediaminded.com.au is the type of business model innovation that Australian industry and government desperately needs. It is the brain child of Scott-Bradley Pearce, Strategic Business Development, CBS Interactive, a digital media pioneer who has worked in and co-owned some of Australia’s leading digital agencies, including Big Hand Asia Pacific, Brainwaave Interactive and MediaZoo and as a result has developed a specific interest in that old-fashion notion - convergence. The site's purpose is to offer students in digital media studies an opportunity to engage with each other whilst working in the real world using real challenges offered by prospective employees gaining practical on the job experience. This may seem relatively simple as a business model at first. Get students to do your work at piecemeal rates was my initial cynical perspective. However, that thinking would be cliched and deceptive. Pearce's business model is really creating a very specific collaborative ecology through building a framework for the potentiality of convergence to occur - very smart contemporary business model thinking!!
Friday, October 3, 2008 at 09:54AM For some time now, I have been inundated with information on innovation methodologies and practices. They all offer meaningful theories around how innovation could occur. All propose systems or processes that are logically constructed and this is where I think these theories miss the point. We invent daily and naturally and we do so non-linearly, illogically and emotionally and we reflect on these inventions - some we have good experiences with, some we don't and some we are not conscious of constructing at all. However, it is the reflection on how we invent where we can best develop an expertise, capability or professionalism in whatever endeavour we work at, not through theoretical constructs. Innovation systems or theories per see don't produce outcomes. Innovation systems simply provide a framework. It is the invention, the ideas
