This is way too long for a blog, but what the heck…
“There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system”- Machiavelli (1469-1527)
One of the biggest issues facing organizations in the early part of the 21st Century is the commercialization of new ideas.Specifically, the issue of how organizations can create cultures and processes that support original thinking, which leads to the development of innovation. This is a tricky business, not least because innovation is a tricky word.
Innovation used to mean newness in a meaningful sense.
But increasingly the word has anesthetised the idea of ideas. Innovation is now a suffix applied to everything from new flavors of jelly to new colors of socks.
Despite this there is still wide agreement about the value of innovation and an emerging consensus about the fact that economic value is increasingly flowing from the human application of creativity, imagination and aesthetics.
Nevertheless there is scant understanding of where innovation comes from or even what the word actually means. Some people see innovation as a mystical process over which organizations have little control, whereas others see innovation as little more than a process that can be planted inside any organization and switched on or off at will. But whilst CEOs speak at conferences and annual meetings about the importance of innovation very few of them can state clearly the direction that innovation should take and fewer still are able to make this direction clearly understood throughout an entire organization.
A key problem is definition. For example, there is confusion between creativity (the ability to see things differently and have new ideas) and innovation (the ability to take these new ideas and make them happen or to extract value from them).
