Innovation Is Only An Outcome!!

(These are the opening remarks I made at the first meeting of AGSM Executive Programmes Roundtable on Leadership, Creativity and Innovation) The word innovation, still in these very hard and disturbing times appears almost daily in the media. There are 360 million references to innovation on Google and on my Google Daily RSS feed I receive notice of new books and articles released daily globally on the topic. And now I get emails daily suggesting that innovation will be the saviour of the current economic times. 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. The reality is one might be able to talk about it as if it is. In practice, the reality is very different. Innovation is an outcome. Nothing more. Creativity and invention with their fellow travellers risk, experimentation and the until more recently undiscussable “f” word “failure” are the drivers of innovation.

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KM is change - and how to do it with stories

Here is a presentation from Slideshare on change that is interesting

KM is change - and how to do it with stories

View more presentations from ShawnCallahan. (tags: storytelling narrative)

IdeaPort : strategic innovation, foresight, and futures thinking.

From the Dec/Jan 09 issue of Fast Company magazine comes a great article about Cisco. Several paragraphs of note including: Get ready for the upturn. “What’s our vision for where this industry is going with or without us?” That, [CEO John Cambers] says, is a five-year horizon. “What is our differentiated strategy within that vision?” That’s a two- to four-year plan. “How are we going to execute in the next 12 to 18 months?” Chambers is convinced that the role of the CEO has to morph. He recalls a lesson he learned working for An Wang of Wang Laboratories, whom he has often called one of the smartest people he’s ever known: “One person cannot anticipate a market transition. At Wang, we transitioned four times, but we missed the fifth, from mini computers to PC and software. If you don’t catch them [all], you leave your company behind.”

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Powerful Solving in the Foundation of Innovation - Matthew Battle

Why innovate? “No matter what anybody else tells you: corporations achieve competitive advantage through acts of innovation.” Peter Drucker According to the Boston Consulting Group 2006 survey Result, 72% of the executives rank innovation as a top-three strategic priority, up from 66% in 2005. 72% of respondents said their companies would increase spending on innovation in 2006. At the same time, many executives—nearly half of those surveyed—remain unsatisfied with the financial returns on their companies’ investments in innovation. Does that sound familiar to you? Why is innovation so important to CEO s? In the past, there has been a major trend among companies to reduce cost. 6-Sigma tools were so efficient for cost-cutting in transactional areas, as well as in technical areas, that their reputation has reached every big company. What they want: To gain money! This rigorous approach allows you to increase your margin by the given formula: Profits = Revenues – Costs Big profits can for sure come from decreasing your costs. But, in the end, even if a company has become the most efficient one on earth, it doesn’t mean it will be the most profitable. Why? Because the revenues will stay fixed, and more, will decrease year after year as the customer gets used to the product, and because competitors will launch some new, audacious products to compete with it!

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Live the Juggle Life

Work We are all obsessed by it. That 4-letter word. We spend our lives doing it, thinking about it, talking about it. So, if you’re not doing it right or you don’t like it, then you have a problem. Too many people get stuck in a rut in their careers and work lives. They get embedded in a “this is how things should be done” culture, where they are slaves to the corporation, where they leave scrambled up world of work, everything’s changing in ways we could never have anticipated. Wall BlackBerries; we want to be in control of our destiny. Street banks crash overnight, airlines go out of business in a flash, and long established institutions suddenly fade from the business landscape. Technology revolutionizes how we do business, and trading barriers have crumbled as we face competition not just from the next zip code, but from the other side of the planet. Long established global corporations face threats from young start-ups. The only certainty (of course) is that everything’s changing. Increasingly, we are ideas-rich, yet time-poor. Our lives are full of growing to-do lists, of jobs to do, ideas to develop, but not enough hours in the day. We don’t want to be slaves to our bosses or our their personality at the office door, and the Work You is a million miles away from the Real You.

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