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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The Power of Reflection on Innovation - Dr Ralph Kerle, the Creative Leadership Forum

In creativity, it is often not until you have completed a piece of work that the obvious intent of the work appears to you.

This is particularly relevant in the case of innovation. Personal creativity, the input that produces organizational innovation, never follows a direct path and this has important strategic implications for organizations pursuing systemic innovation as a prime business objective.

Our challenge in developing the analytic, the Management Innovation Index™ (the MIX™), was to model an organization's innovation as a whole system in order to make innovation measurable. Over 3 years, we trialled...read more....

The Yin and the Yang of Corporate Innovation - NYTimes.com

IN the hunt for innovation, that elusive path to economic growth and corporate prosperity, try a little jazz as an inspirational metaphor. Enlarge This Image In business as in jazz, the tension between training and improvisation can result in great new works, says John Kao, the innovation adviser (and pianist). That’s the message that John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments — who is also a jazz pianist — was to deliver in a performance and talk on Saturday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Jazz, Mr. Kao says, demonstrates some of the tensions in innovation, between training and discipline on one side and improvised creativity on the other. In business, as in jazz, the interaction of those two sides, the yin and the yang of innovation, fuels new ideas and products. The mixture varies by company. Mr. Kao points to the very different models of innovation represented by Google and Apple, two powerhouses of Silicon Valley, the world’s epicenter of corporate creativity.

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The Days of "Manager Knows Best" Are Ending - Harvard Business Review

To get a glimpse of what tomorrow's young global managers might be like as leaders, take a look at how today's young people think about communications. For one thing, they are devoted to connectivity. In a recent survey of more than 2,800 college students and young professionals in 14 countries, Cisco found that more than half said they could not live without the internet, and if forced to choose, two-thirds would opt to have an internet rather than a car. This intense desire to be connected leads to a demand for greater flexibility: Two out of five people said they'd accept a lower-paying job if the position offered greater flexibility on access to social media, the ability to work from where they chose, and choice on the mobile devices they could use on the job. Tomorrow's young managers will share these attitudes, and workplaces will inevitably become more flexible.

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Creating, Growing, and Sustaining Efficient Innovation Teams - Casimer DeCusatis IBM Corporation, Poughkeepsie, NY

Economic forces such as the growing service economy and commoditization of traditional value chains have led many organizations to pursue breakthrough innovations as part of their business strategy. There has been an increased interest in collaboration and teamwork as catalysts of innovation, often without a clear understanding of the different kinds of teams that can be used to foster innovation or the kinds of team
building that will be most likely to yield desired results. The author describes a framework for innovation teams, ranging from highly structured to spontaneous, giving examples of how different kinds of teams relate to the characteristics of the next generation of innovators.

Read the full case study and see how it illustrates how one approach using preference profiling is more likely to yield tangible results from an innovation team.