How does a business take its innovation strategy beyond the "eureka" moment, and create sustainable growth? Go beyond the one-off disruptions that many companies become well known for. Formulate a dynamic process of continually creating new business models, improving the customer experience, opening new markets, launching new products, and creating a culture of innovation.
The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania is offering a unique program to drive innovation at your business beyond one-offs, and help you create a complete process for creating constant innovation: Full-Spectrum Innovation: Driving Organic Growth. The program offered from June 25-June27 at Wharton will help you:
* Better target innovation resources to achieve the most impact.
* Develop a broad view of organizational innovation.
* Gain a toolkit of diverse approaches and best practices for encouraging innovation.
* Rethink the "innovation DNA" to design and lead innovation across the organization.
My observations on how innovations are created at the Top 20 Innovators of The Innovation Index had led me to create the following five principles for successful innovation:
1. Vision to create new products, business models or processes that make a difference and create new markets
2. Systematic processes and rigor that stimulate creativity and learning to execute on the vision
3. Reward and recognition system for teams to take measured risks, experiment, and assess
4. Focus on clear and present customer needs, the market facts, and the intangible
5. Growth-oriented leadership that is decisive, inclusive, focused, takes risks, and has market expertise
"The Wharton program's workshop approach offers hands-on experience in defining and implementing innovation in an organization. As part of a cohort of innovation leaders from around the world, attendees will have inside access to the latest best practices - from innovative companies such as P&G and Southwest Airlines (two of the Top 20 Innovators on The Innovation Index). As well as research from Wharton's Mack Center for Technological Innovation, which leads one of the largest ongoing research projects on managing emerging technologies,” says Michael McTigue, Director of Communications at Aresty Institute of Executive Education, The Wharton School.
The program offers interaction and dialog with thought-leaders including George Day and Paul Schoemaker; ability to learn and experiment with new innovation frameworks from Larry Huston, former vice president of innovation at Procter & Gamble and the creator of their celebrated "Connect and Develop" strategy; and mine the value of blogs and search engines in the "Innovation in Cyberspace" panel discussion, featuring front-line innovators from Southwest Airlines and influential bloggers.
In particular, McTigue emphasizes, "Readers are now organizing themselves around topic areas at a grassroots level, sharing ideas, and offering constructive criticism. Blogs including "Creativity and Innovation Driving Business" are an invaluable forum for innovation leaders who want to create cultures of innovation in their organizations."
McTigue promises a great experience: “Our faculty members will provide perspectives on developing a market-driven strategy, understanding new product development successes and failures, improving "peripheral vision" to sense emerging opportunities, and engaging in value innovation to capitalize on new market space.”
It is great to see The Wharton School leading this paradigm, and offering pertinent executive education on Innovation that includes today’s latest technology drivers. Strategy leaders, managers of new businesses, chief innovation officers, chief technology officers, and product development leaders responsible for driving top-line growth, and promoting and delivering innovation would definitely want to attend this program.
Showing posts with label creativity innovation process. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity innovation process. Show all posts
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Friday, October 6, 2006
Blocking Creativity and Innovation
Is your organization Blocking or Stifling Creativity? How do you harness Creativity and produce new Innovation in your organization?
As organizations grow, they setup structures that inherently block creativity.
Systems and Processes
Have your heard of organizational efficiency? Bottomline? Operational excellence? Larger organizations setup systems and processes to become leaner and more efficient, and become focused internally. However, when the systems and processes become an end goal, creativity that drives new innovations and competitive spirit becomes non-existent over a period of time. Hence, organizations must build new processes such as identifying and isolating key creative teams from the rest of the organizations, and stimulating them towards driving innovation.
Selected references:
Leading eBook on Creativity and Innovation in Business
Creativity and Innovation Best Practices
Creativity and Innovation Case Studies
The Innovation Index
Top 50 innovative companies in the world
As organizations grow, they setup structures that inherently block creativity.
Systems and Processes
Have your heard of organizational efficiency? Bottomline? Operational excellence? Larger organizations setup systems and processes to become leaner and more efficient, and become focused internally. However, when the systems and processes become an end goal, creativity that drives new innovations and competitive spirit becomes non-existent over a period of time. Hence, organizations must build new processes such as identifying and isolating key creative teams from the rest of the organizations, and stimulating them towards driving innovation.
Selected references:
Leading eBook on Creativity and Innovation in Business
Creativity and Innovation Best Practices
Creativity and Innovation Case Studies
The Innovation Index
Top 50 innovative companies in the world
Reward and Recognition Systems
Who do you reward and recognize at your organization? The operational excellence team, the sales team or the innovation team? Do you even have rewards and recognition systems in place? If you are frequently associated with rewarding behaviors like "going with the flow" and where behaviors like "questioning status quo" are ignored or even reprimanded, creativity will suffer. In order to create the best creative output from employees and teams, organizations must put formal rewards and recognition systems for the innovators and creativity contributors. Recognition and rewards could be in the form of a company-wide announcement of the contributions of your most innovative employees, press releases recognizing and introducing their innovations, providing the innovators paid vacations and combining them with trade shows where they can meet customers, salary bonuses, and more.
Organizational Culture
What stories do you hear in the cafeteria? Are the stories about the next big innovation that someone is working on, a new marketing campaign that is creating great returns or a product that was launched last year and became hugely successful? Or are the stories (or lack thereof) about improving profit margins, increasing productivity and becoming an efficient organization? An organization's culture is built on stories and legends. How many of these stories are known and recognized by the external world? An organization where creativity was not celebrated historically rarely has a vibrant creative environment. However, organizations where most talked about stories revolve around creativity, inspire others to follow suit, building a culture of creativity.
Creative ideas must make business sense. For instance, asking questions on whether you have the means to convert an idea into innovation, the associated costs of doing this, how many customers will use this new innovation, and the revenue potential. Most successful organizations achieve a balance between creativity and operational excellence.
Here are nine processes that you can create at your organization to unblock Creativity and drive Innovation:
Who do you reward and recognize at your organization? The operational excellence team, the sales team or the innovation team? Do you even have rewards and recognition systems in place? If you are frequently associated with rewarding behaviors like "going with the flow" and where behaviors like "questioning status quo" are ignored or even reprimanded, creativity will suffer. In order to create the best creative output from employees and teams, organizations must put formal rewards and recognition systems for the innovators and creativity contributors. Recognition and rewards could be in the form of a company-wide announcement of the contributions of your most innovative employees, press releases recognizing and introducing their innovations, providing the innovators paid vacations and combining them with trade shows where they can meet customers, salary bonuses, and more.
Organizational Culture
What stories do you hear in the cafeteria? Are the stories about the next big innovation that someone is working on, a new marketing campaign that is creating great returns or a product that was launched last year and became hugely successful? Or are the stories (or lack thereof) about improving profit margins, increasing productivity and becoming an efficient organization? An organization's culture is built on stories and legends. How many of these stories are known and recognized by the external world? An organization where creativity was not celebrated historically rarely has a vibrant creative environment. However, organizations where most talked about stories revolve around creativity, inspire others to follow suit, building a culture of creativity.
Creative ideas must make business sense. For instance, asking questions on whether you have the means to convert an idea into innovation, the associated costs of doing this, how many customers will use this new innovation, and the revenue potential. Most successful organizations achieve a balance between creativity and operational excellence.
Here are nine processes that you can create at your organization to unblock Creativity and drive Innovation:
- Open communication within and between departments, and across all management layers.
- Hiring of people with diverse backgrounds and experience, and avoiding "cloning."
- Encouraging employees to find new ways to do their daily work, and empowering them to make decisions.
- Creating an organization that extends out to customers, suppliers, partners, and environment.
- Stimulating research activities and providing employees some free time to experiment.
- Allowing employees to take measured risks (with small costs), and seizing opportunities.
- Creating processes to evaluate any idea on merit, regardless of where it is coming from.
- Identifying and separating the creative from operational functions in the organization.
- Using group creativity techniques frequently to promote team building and generate new ideas.
Selected references:
Leading eBook on Creativity and Innovation in Business
Creativity and Innovation Best Practices
Creativity and Innovation Case Studies
The Innovation Index
Top 50 innovative companies in the world
If you enjoyed reading this Creativity best practice, I recommend the complete list of Creativity Innovation Best Practices.
Acknowledgements:
eCornell. Leading through Creativity Certification Training.
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