The Impotency of Organizational Innovation

Dig into the rigorous thinking via Google Scholar on innovation and you will find there are 2, 300,000 articles and books of an academic nature that have verified and validated every different type of known innovation process - disruptive, open source, front end, back end, induced, user, IT, supply chain, management, R&D and even innovative innovation!! Enough information to drive you crazy. And worse still, there is a huge problem with most of it!! It perceives innovation as a theory and a process and it is neither. It’s a practice‼ Innovation as theory is like

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The Hard Currency in Uncertain Economic Times - Ideas!

It’s all very well to talk about innovation in times like this. However innovation is intangible and intangibility is not what we need right now. Organizations need evidence, hard numbers that enable them to really understand how they are operating functionally on a daily basis. Yet it is the focus on the ideas that flow around that functionality that create the seeds of innovation. Without that exchange of ideas, organizational stagnation and pessimism set in, morale collapses and passion dies. Thus, the hard currency in these unstable economic times is ideas‼ Innovation is invariable viewed as

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Understanding The Discipline of Innovation

Last week I had the opportunity to run a workshop “An Understanding of Innovation, Its Application and Implementation” in Jakarta, Indonesia for 10 CIOs from some of the world’s largest multi-national companies – industries represented included airline, auto-manufacturing, consumer products, petroleum, pharmaceutical, transport and logistics. Four interesting findings about innovation to emerge from the workshop.

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Predicting the Outcomes of Creativity and Innovation in Organisations - Chairman's Message October 2010.

Our journey of discovering on this topic began almost two years ago when I wanted to try and assess the value of the creative leadership and creativity programmes we were delivering. The more I inquired the more it became apparent, answers were not easy or readily available. The major national research project “Is Australian management creative and innovative?” the Creative Leadership Forum completed in 2008 further complicated the issue when it revealed over 75% of managers said the creativity and innovation training they received was at best ineffectual, at worst a complete waste of time and money. Since 2008, I have had many conversations with senior leaders in organisations in which they were simply trying to define what innovation actually meant in the context of their organisations, before even starting to plan how to develop strategic thinking around the concept of creativity and innovation.

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Why Leadership Styles Matter and Influence Innovation Outcomes - Ralph Kerle

In the past decade, I have listened to many leaders across all sorts of industries and organisations dialogue about innovation but very rarely have I seen organisations actually embody and live the outcomes of these dialogues. Facilitated dialogues and workshops with the endorsement and often participation of company leaders introducing the strategy and tactics of innovation invariably leave participants highly enthused. Yet very often after a relative short period of time, organisations absorb this optimism and little changes. Leaders attest to the many difficulties associated with organisational innovation, not least of which are the political ramifications. Innovation is like a political movement, often polarising entrenched hierarchies, organisational elites and factions. Innovation favours ideators and implementers, those wanting to overthrow the status quo and get on with change, challenging anybody who stands in their way. How a leader handles this ebb and flow of unresolved organisational tension is crucial to the implementation of innovation.

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