Innovation and ...
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Creativity and Brainstorming, Jamming or Improvising |
- Creativity creates ideas. Innovation creates positive change.
- Creativity is an important part of innovation, but it is not as important as understanding the framework of the issue, precisely defining the problem and planning the implementation of the best solutions.
- If you have the right framework and the right problem, you don't need to be very creative - any solution will probably be innovative. On the other hand, if you have no framework and the wrong problem, the most brilliant creativity can't help you, as you'll only find great solutions that go in the wrong direction.
- The biggest practical and visible difference between innovation and creativity is the use of boundaries. In innovation you want all the boundaries made clear upfront, all the rules you can't break, all the real constraints imposed by management, the law or gravity. Innovation is applied creative thinking within the framework of reality.
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- "If only our people had more and better ideas." Ideas are worth nothing until someone does something with them that's useful for the organization. It's easy to have good ideas; it's difficult to implement change successfully.
- Everybody loves ideas, especially if they don't have to implement them. Have you noticed how a great idea can fizzle once it needs to be put into action?
- Creativity is getting more ideas. Innovation is getting better results.
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Innovation and Problem Solving |
- Innovation is finding the best solution for the real problem - the cause, not the symptoms. In that sense it is very similar to system thinking.
- Good problem solving is innovation. Innovation is better problem solving (i.e., the best solution under the real circumstances).
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- R&D innovation is only a narrow subset of innovation.
- The critical difference between innovation and R&D innovation is the tolerance for errors. In R&D, a reject factor of 90% (or even 99.9%) can be considered normal and acceptable. Innovation in the rest of the organization could never be sustained if the failure rate was so high. Imagine a large bank creating innovative products and think of an acceptable error rate. Or think of an innovative IT system - what would be a tolerable failure rate?
- Managing R&D innovation is fundamentally different from managing innovation in the rest of the organization.
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Innovation and Entrepreneurship |
- Many (if not most) large organizations look at entrepreneurship as the holy grail of management, the panacea to get them out of their behaviourial and thinking ruts. "If only our managers could have more entrepreneurial attitudes."
- But the entrepreneurial model can work well and sustainably only in new or in small and medium-sized organizations (or in isolated small or medium subsets of larger organizations) because it requires a tolerance for chaos and an ability to make quick and radical shifts that are impossible for a larger organization with all its built-in controls and paradigms. The same leaders who want their organization to be more entrepreneurial would probably be the first to stifle it.
- "There is a limit to creating entrepreneurial behaviors in large organizations. EDS split itself in 30 units to create entrepreneurial behaviors. Very soon the 30 units were working at cross purposes, duplicating developments and fighting for clients." - Dick Brown, Chairman and CEO of EDS in Fast Company
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Innovation and Kaizen, Six-Sigma, Continuous improvement, Re-engineering or Quality Circles |
- Kaizen, Six-Sigma, CI, Re-engineering and Quality Circles are just different application software that run better with Innovative Thinking than with regular school thinking
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Innovation and Strategic Planning |
- Strategy is problem solving. It answers the question: How to identify the best course for the organization?
- Our experience with large organizations demonstrates that a good innovative thinking model can be transferred to the strategy process.
- If we make the assumption that strategy is the domain of the executive, then innovative strategy is just innovative thinking by the organization's executive. It's where the executives can demonstrate innovation and role-model the right behaviour.
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