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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Managing Creativity from An Organizational Economics Perspective

This white paper supports the theory and practice behind the Management Innovation Index by exploring the organizational dilemma of intangibility in innovation and the consequences of ignoring it; proposing a case for a systems thinking approach to organizational creativity to drive measurable innovation; reviewing the importance of the emergence of the new field of organizational economics as a way of analyzing organizations and offers a method for measuring and managing the impact of creativity on the key measures for success of an organization or business in 21st Century.

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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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Innovation is Dead - The Chairman's Message March 2010

Bruce Nussbaum, Managing Editor, Business Week USA published an article on December 31, 2008 provocatively entitled "Innovation is Dead" in which he suggested innovation "….was done in by CEOs, consultants, marketeers, advertisers and business journalists who degraded and devalued the idea by conflating it with change, technology, design, globalization, trendiness, and anything “new.” It was done in by an obsession with measurement, metrics and math and a demand for predictability in an unpredictable world. The concept was also done in, strangely enough, by a male-dominated economic leadership that rejected the extraordinary progress in “uncertainty planning and strategy” being done at key schools of design that could have given new life to “innovation. To them, “design” is something their wives do with curtains, not a methodology or philosophy to deal with life in constant BETA — life in 2010…" Constantly confused and used interchangeably with creativity, “innovation” is worse than dead. It has become meaningless.

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