Overview: Innovation Strategy
While innovation can’t be turned on like a tap, it is something you can make more likely to happen.
Creating a favourable environment for innovation starts with getting the basics right:
- integrating your internal and external communications strategies,
- combining them with knowledge management tools and processes,
- and integrating training and employee engagement programmes.
In other words, what I mean by digital transformation.
Integrating these strategies, processes and tools provides a strong foundation onto which you can build dedicated innovation processes.
However, building and integrating them is itself a major innovation challenge!
Sidestep this chicken-and-egg problem by framing each strategy and programme as key components of the final, integrated goal: to build an Internal Innovation Community, which:
- supports knowledge management, information flows, (in)formal training, ideation, employee engagement and more
- helps your external communications team discover useful internal content, and transfer it outwards
- ensures useful external information reaches the right people inside
- spreads an innovation & communications culture throughout the organisation.
But don’t try and build it all at once. Instead, build and roll out one part of the Programme, and then use it to build and roll out the next.
Like to figure out how? Get in touch.
More services: start with Communication strategy.
Relevant resources
www.fastcompany.com
Yet another list. My fave: "Geniuses produce a lot of crap before they get to the good stuff. " - 4 Things We Have Wrong About Creativity | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
weblog.mediatemple.net
Easier said than done. It'd be a lot simpler if we could just Kill the Mediocre. "From startups to global enterprises I see two things. One, I've observed the voicing of ideas that immediately vanish into the ether of complacence, politics or blatant disregard. Two, I've witnessed the escape of morale where employees refuse to share ideas to im…
sloanreview.mit.edu
"coming up with creative ideas on demand is only part of the answer. Just as crucial is how ideas link to action. ...we have developed an integrative process for idea generation based on approaches drawn education, consumer research, business model design and emergent strategy... The first three steps are designed to help managers understa…
www.brainpickings.org
Remind me to buy this guy's books: "There is no way by which events can be directly recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, different in every individual, differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each…
timkastelle.org
the company that invented Gore-Tex... “organised in small teams of 8-12 people.... three layers of management, the CEO, a handful of functional heads, and Associates … in a company of 8000!
www.inc.com
"Since ancient times people have held the notion that there's something mysterious, unpredictable, and even divine about where good ideas come from. But according to David Burkus, assistant professor of management at Oral Roberts University, today researchers are studying the heck out of creativity and much of what we think we know about the topic…
www.psychologytoday.com
Worth a read, food for thought: "But while we love reading up on how these leaders turned the tide in their industry or organization, recent research suggests that most creative people aren't given the opportunity to lead. We love stories of creative people; we just don't want to be led by them."