What is Innovation?

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Lightbulb_1 Jason Goldberg’s recent blog post on innovation has spurred an entry I’ve been putting off for a while.  Back in Feb, I attended an IBM conference on innovation (in preparation for a Global CEO Study on Innovation they recently released).  The study was quite interesting and discussed some of the current drives of innovation. 

Most importantly though, we had some quite engaging discussion around 3 areas of innovation:

  • Business model innovation – Their is lots of talk around business model innovation right now.  Business model innovation can not only create substantial margin leverage but can also extend the divide between your competitors.
  • Collaborative innovation.  Collaborative innovation is an increasingly interesting area for me.  As IBM stated, they don’t necessarily need to have the best technology but, more importantly, need to have the best ecosystem.  Ecosystems are changing the game.  In their CEO study, over 2/3rds of companies stated external collaboration with partners and clients provide better ideas for the company than their employees. 
  • Cultural innovation.  Cultural innovation is vital for sustainable innovation.  The biggest obstacle for fostering innovation at most large companies is culture.  This is where market leaders and laggards succeed. 

Is your company innovating?

  • http://krob.hrblogs.org Kris

    Great topic. I’m currently reading “Making Innovation Work” by Davila, Epstein adn Shelton. My company is a very small, very different kind of company and we are constantly trying to find ways to foster innovation at every level.

    One of the ideas in this book is that you must have…”Innovation networks inside and outside the organization because networks, not individuals, are the basic building blocks of innovation.”

    This is one of the reasons I decided to move from the world of personal blogging to blogging about HR and business. It is part of growing my network of people and ideas.

    Check out the book if you haven’t already. The tag line of the book is “how to manage it, measure it and profit from it.” I think that innovation very often sounds like a huge, fuzzy concept to people and this book (at least so far) is really good at nailing down the specifics.

  • Jennifer Thompson

    My company is transitioning from a not-for-profit organization to a revenue generating organization and are facing the reality that we my approach everything we do with innovative lenses. How do you get people to see relationships between seemingly disconnected elements. Also how do you get them to distill odd ideas down to their underlying principles. Just thought you would be able to help with those items.

    Jen

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