Innovation: is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulate needs, or existing market needs. Innovation leadership: involves synthesizing different leadership styles in organizations to influence employees to produce creative ideas, products, services and solutions.
This chapter is dedicated to innovation and becoming an innovative leader. Innovation is key to starting my own business and its success. Innovation and an innovation culture is important in making my ideas for a RT consulting business work. the articles that I have included in this chapter discuss innovation/leadership; I have summarized the key ideas and how they relate to my goals. I have included exercises that are helpful in encouraging innovation. I have summarized the information in this chapter into slides that can be used to present this material.
Articles on innovation:
This chapter is dedicated to innovation and becoming an innovative leader. Innovation is key to starting my own business and its success. Innovation and an innovation culture is important in making my ideas for a RT consulting business work. the articles that I have included in this chapter discuss innovation/leadership; I have summarized the key ideas and how they relate to my goals. I have included exercises that are helpful in encouraging innovation. I have summarized the information in this chapter into slides that can be used to present this material.
Articles on innovation:
![](http://www.weebly.com/weebly/images/file_icons/pdf.png)
27010474.pdf | |
File Size: | 108 kb |
File Type: |
Leadership for sustainable innovation
Bart A.G. Bossink
This article explores and explains the effects of a leader's management style on innovation processes. It describes 4 types of leadership styles (charismatic, instrumental, strategic, and interactive) and how each contribute to the development of sustainable innovation processes. The conclusion is that a manager's performance of an innovation leadership style is successful where it is combined with the management of knowledge. The performance or a leadership style and the management of the additional knowledge exchange jointly stimulate sustainable innovation. This is relative to starting a business because it is important to me to encourage innovation and innovative thinking. The more information I have about how to do this will be beneficial to my business.
Bart A.G. Bossink
This article explores and explains the effects of a leader's management style on innovation processes. It describes 4 types of leadership styles (charismatic, instrumental, strategic, and interactive) and how each contribute to the development of sustainable innovation processes. The conclusion is that a manager's performance of an innovation leadership style is successful where it is combined with the management of knowledge. The performance or a leadership style and the management of the additional knowledge exchange jointly stimulate sustainable innovation. This is relative to starting a business because it is important to me to encourage innovation and innovative thinking. The more information I have about how to do this will be beneficial to my business.
![](http://www.weebly.com/weebly/images/file_icons/pdf.png)
47134972.pdf | |
File Size: | 219 kb |
File Type: |
Leadership and Innovation: Learning from the Best
Roland Bel
In starting my own business innovation in important to me. Becoming an innovative leader is also something that I am aspiring to be. Innovation leadership is too diverse to be left to single individuals, it must be embedded in your organization. Innovation leadership's role is about inspiration. This article details what an innovative leader is, and describes a common profile for innovative leaders. Successful innovative leaders are characterized by a set of common attributes and abilities detailed in the article. The primary role for an innovative leader should be to create a climate for innovation. This article contains the information I need to become the leader that I aspire to be. It names some of the most innovative leaders of our time and will be used as a resource as I become closer to achieving my career goals.
Roland Bel
In starting my own business innovation in important to me. Becoming an innovative leader is also something that I am aspiring to be. Innovation leadership is too diverse to be left to single individuals, it must be embedded in your organization. Innovation leadership's role is about inspiration. This article details what an innovative leader is, and describes a common profile for innovative leaders. Successful innovative leaders are characterized by a set of common attributes and abilities detailed in the article. The primary role for an innovative leader should be to create a climate for innovation. This article contains the information I need to become the leader that I aspire to be. It names some of the most innovative leaders of our time and will be used as a resource as I become closer to achieving my career goals.
![](http://www.weebly.com/weebly/images/file_icons/pdf.png)
8724551.pdf | |
File Size: | 102 kb |
File Type: |
Culture and Climate for Innovation
Pervaiz K. Ahmed
In this article it is highlighted that most companies talk about innovation but that very few actually succeed in doing it. Innovation is inevitably linked to risk and that can frighten organizations. Although innovation cannot be touched or seen, it can be felt and can be described as an attitude that allows businesses to see beyond the present and create the future. One thing to consider when hiring is that there are types of employees that can most effectively drive innovation. This article describes the personality traits for this type of person as well as cognitive factors, and personal motivations that affect innovation. This article details how innovation is influenced by social processes and some structures that will hinder innovation. There is a long list of cultural norms and how they impact innovation within your organization as well as describing how corporate missions and philosophy statements impact innovation. Being an innovative leader is one of my most important goals and educating myself on how to accomplish this is a priority. The following exercises are just some of the things that I can do to accomplish this goal.
Exercises to encourage innovation:
Exercises to improve innovation:
Innovation is the implementation of creative ideas. Creative ideas are the output of imagination. Just about every CEO these days insists that innovation is critical to her firm’s future. Curiously, precious few talk about the importance of imagination. But, without imagination, you will not foster innovation. The result is rather like a car maker attempting to make cars without thinking about the engines.
What this means is that if you want to make the most of the innovation potential of your employees, you need to encourage and promote the use of imagination. This includes institutionalizing imagination so that it becomes a core corporate competence. It includes having the CEO talk about the importance of imagination to her employees and to her firm. It includes exercising imagination so each employee can use hers at a moment’s notice. After all, unexercised imagination gets flabby and slow.
Here are some activities that not only exercise the imagination, but sometimes result in innovative ideas and new ways of thinking about key corporate issues.
Role Play
“Role play” is a grown-up term for the games of pretend that we used to play as children. Role play is about two or more people taking on defined roles and playing out a little drama. For example, you can role play the act of selling a service to a difficult client. Have someone from the sales department play the difficult client (sales people will have experience with such people and will be able to play them realistically) have another person from any department other than sales play the role of the sales person. Have the two people play out a sales meeting. Tell them to let loose and push their characters. Have others watch the role play and invite them to shout suggestions to the players. Discuss the results afterwards.
You can role play customer complaints, negotiating with suppliers, dealing with specific problems and much more. You can even move away from scenarios based around your business and role-play other activities, such as job interviews, negotiations (which do not involve company activities), handling emotions and much more.
Role plays are terrific methods of exercising imagination because they force role players to pretend to be people different to themselves, think differently than they usually do and respond to imaginary issues. Indeed, it is important to have participants play roles dissimilar to their actual characters and positions in the company.
As an added benefit, when you role play business related scenarios, you also help train your employees to better understand your business, their colleagues, your clients and how to perform tasks more effectively. Indeed, if you are not using role play in your training, you should.
Extreme Scenarios
What would happen if your head office was blown up in a terrorist explosion? How might you ensure your business survived? What new legislation might destroy your business? How might you work around such legislation? What is the worst thing your competition could do to you? How might you react? What technical developments might make your product obsolete overnight (use your imagination, don’t be afraid to think about developments such as time travel, teleportation, mind reading, etc.)? What might you do if one or more of those developments took place tomorrow?
Brainstorming extreme scenarios such as these and then brainstorming possible solutions to the scenarios is a great way of stretching your imagination. For example a facilitator working with an airline asks employees the question: “what technological developments could make our business obsolete overnight?” A little brainstorming might discover threats such as teleportation, super high-speed rail travel, cheap solar powered rocket cars and so on.
The facilitator then divides the group into small teams. Each team could take one scenario and come up with solutions. Encourage them to forget any perceived limitations and push their imaginations. After a few hours or days (depending on your time frame for this exercise), have the teams meet up, share and discuss their solutions.
Because extreme scenarios involve drastic, yet unlikely events, they stretch the imagination. Envisioning such events and dreaming up methods of coping with them pushes the imagination yet further.
Yet, as unlikely as extreme scenarios usually are, thinking about their consequences sometimes results in powerful ideas that can be implemented – to your benefit – without the extreme scenario actually occurring in real life. And you never know. Before 11 September 2001, the idea of terrorists crashing aeroplanes into the World Trade Centre would have been perceived as an extreme scenario – and an unlikely one at that.
Long Term Envisioning
Try to imagine what your company will be like in 50 years. 100 years. 200 years. Draw up a plan of what you will be doing, what the market will be like and how you got there. Better still, divide a large group into several teams of about five participants each. Have each team draw up a vision plan for the year 2106. Then bring everyone together and present the plans. Share and compare.
Getting beyond the usual one year, five year or even ten year business plan, puts you into the unknowable future. Without clear facts to guide you, you are left to your imagination to create a vision of that far future.
Nevertheless, some of the ideas you dream up for the next century may suggest realistic goals for the near future. Yet again, this is an imagination exercise that sometimes provides potential practical benefits.
100 Uses for Your Product/100 New Services A classic creativity exercise is to find 100 uses for a brick, a bucket of water, a bathtub or any other commonplace object. Such exercises stretch your imagination. So, why not try the same, but using one of your products as the focus of the challenge? Get a group together and brainstorm 100 uses for the product.
If you are a service company, that may not be possible. Instead, brainstorm 100 new services you could offer using your existing resources.
This exercise not only stretches the imagination, but focuses it on a key component of your business and so can result in practical ideas which can readily be implemented. It’s rather like bicycling 10 km to the shops and back. Not only do you get exercise, but you get the shopping done as well.
Conclusion
Of course, imagination exercises take up valuable time and do not always bring in immediately usable results. But, just as an athlete must exercise regularly to stay in shape and perform to the best of her abilities, so too must your corporate imagination get regular exercise in order that your employees innovate to the best of their abilities.
Exercise 2:
Now, that we’ve pondered, What is Innovation? in order to come up with a working definition (A New Idea, Creation, Offering or Process that Adds Value), it’s time to ask the big duh question:
How do you come up with that new idea, creation, offering or process that adds value?
The definition of innovation – the quality or attribute that makes innovation different from creativity – suggests that there might be tools and practices that work ESPECIALLY WELL in encouraging innovation specifically.
In other words, certain creativity tools and practices are inherently more adept at fostering “new + value” thinking.
Broken & Brilliant (laying the groundwork for innovative thinking by identifying what's missing) Because innovation includes the creation of additional value, a perfect place to start the process of innovating is to look at the environment in which your idea will exist (at work/in your industry or category/in your customers’ or audiences’ lives, etc.) and ask:
What’s Broken? What’s Brilliant?
What’s Broken? (You’ll notice there is a little repetition in the questions below – often even slightly changing the way you ask something can shift the brain; help you see things from a different angle.)
Ask yourself – Related to my work, industry, category, product/service, creation, customer/audience – or whatever I’m working on:
What’s not working?
What’s not working as well as it could? What could be done better?
What customer or audience needs are not being met?
What are people not saying or doing?
Where are the hiccups, bumps or obstacles – no matter how big or small?
Where is there a gap or a glitch? What’s missing here?
What do I wish existed? What do my customers/audience wish existed?
What needs to change? Design? Smell? Touch? Feel? Taste? Texture? Timing? Style? Performance? Result?
How or where could this (look, smell, feel, go, be) better?
How could this get or be worse?
In finding the gaps, you can find the space to innovate.
What’s Brilliant? (Again, you’ll notice a little repetition.)
Ask yourself – Related to my work, industry, category, product/service, creation, customer/audience – or whatever I’m working on:
What’s perfect? What’s almost perfect?
What’s breakthrough? What’s about to or needs to break through?
What looks, smells, feels, etc., great?
Where is design, performance, style, touch, feel, taste, texture, timing, results top-notch?
What are people saying or doing that tells me this is brilliant?
What does this make me want more of? What does this make my customers/audience want more of?
What do I want my customers/audience to do/say more, or more often?
What do I love about this? What do my customers/audience love about this?
How could this get or be any better?
In finding the perfection, you find the space to innovate even further through the parts that aren’t quite yet as good as they could be. In this way, the What’s Brilliant? questions offer a perspective shift that can help you find additional fodder for your What’s Broken? exploration.
Pervaiz K. Ahmed
In this article it is highlighted that most companies talk about innovation but that very few actually succeed in doing it. Innovation is inevitably linked to risk and that can frighten organizations. Although innovation cannot be touched or seen, it can be felt and can be described as an attitude that allows businesses to see beyond the present and create the future. One thing to consider when hiring is that there are types of employees that can most effectively drive innovation. This article describes the personality traits for this type of person as well as cognitive factors, and personal motivations that affect innovation. This article details how innovation is influenced by social processes and some structures that will hinder innovation. There is a long list of cultural norms and how they impact innovation within your organization as well as describing how corporate missions and philosophy statements impact innovation. Being an innovative leader is one of my most important goals and educating myself on how to accomplish this is a priority. The following exercises are just some of the things that I can do to accomplish this goal.
Exercises to encourage innovation:
Exercises to improve innovation:
Innovation is the implementation of creative ideas. Creative ideas are the output of imagination. Just about every CEO these days insists that innovation is critical to her firm’s future. Curiously, precious few talk about the importance of imagination. But, without imagination, you will not foster innovation. The result is rather like a car maker attempting to make cars without thinking about the engines.
What this means is that if you want to make the most of the innovation potential of your employees, you need to encourage and promote the use of imagination. This includes institutionalizing imagination so that it becomes a core corporate competence. It includes having the CEO talk about the importance of imagination to her employees and to her firm. It includes exercising imagination so each employee can use hers at a moment’s notice. After all, unexercised imagination gets flabby and slow.
Here are some activities that not only exercise the imagination, but sometimes result in innovative ideas and new ways of thinking about key corporate issues.
Role Play
“Role play” is a grown-up term for the games of pretend that we used to play as children. Role play is about two or more people taking on defined roles and playing out a little drama. For example, you can role play the act of selling a service to a difficult client. Have someone from the sales department play the difficult client (sales people will have experience with such people and will be able to play them realistically) have another person from any department other than sales play the role of the sales person. Have the two people play out a sales meeting. Tell them to let loose and push their characters. Have others watch the role play and invite them to shout suggestions to the players. Discuss the results afterwards.
You can role play customer complaints, negotiating with suppliers, dealing with specific problems and much more. You can even move away from scenarios based around your business and role-play other activities, such as job interviews, negotiations (which do not involve company activities), handling emotions and much more.
Role plays are terrific methods of exercising imagination because they force role players to pretend to be people different to themselves, think differently than they usually do and respond to imaginary issues. Indeed, it is important to have participants play roles dissimilar to their actual characters and positions in the company.
As an added benefit, when you role play business related scenarios, you also help train your employees to better understand your business, their colleagues, your clients and how to perform tasks more effectively. Indeed, if you are not using role play in your training, you should.
Extreme Scenarios
What would happen if your head office was blown up in a terrorist explosion? How might you ensure your business survived? What new legislation might destroy your business? How might you work around such legislation? What is the worst thing your competition could do to you? How might you react? What technical developments might make your product obsolete overnight (use your imagination, don’t be afraid to think about developments such as time travel, teleportation, mind reading, etc.)? What might you do if one or more of those developments took place tomorrow?
Brainstorming extreme scenarios such as these and then brainstorming possible solutions to the scenarios is a great way of stretching your imagination. For example a facilitator working with an airline asks employees the question: “what technological developments could make our business obsolete overnight?” A little brainstorming might discover threats such as teleportation, super high-speed rail travel, cheap solar powered rocket cars and so on.
The facilitator then divides the group into small teams. Each team could take one scenario and come up with solutions. Encourage them to forget any perceived limitations and push their imaginations. After a few hours or days (depending on your time frame for this exercise), have the teams meet up, share and discuss their solutions.
Because extreme scenarios involve drastic, yet unlikely events, they stretch the imagination. Envisioning such events and dreaming up methods of coping with them pushes the imagination yet further.
Yet, as unlikely as extreme scenarios usually are, thinking about their consequences sometimes results in powerful ideas that can be implemented – to your benefit – without the extreme scenario actually occurring in real life. And you never know. Before 11 September 2001, the idea of terrorists crashing aeroplanes into the World Trade Centre would have been perceived as an extreme scenario – and an unlikely one at that.
Long Term Envisioning
Try to imagine what your company will be like in 50 years. 100 years. 200 years. Draw up a plan of what you will be doing, what the market will be like and how you got there. Better still, divide a large group into several teams of about five participants each. Have each team draw up a vision plan for the year 2106. Then bring everyone together and present the plans. Share and compare.
Getting beyond the usual one year, five year or even ten year business plan, puts you into the unknowable future. Without clear facts to guide you, you are left to your imagination to create a vision of that far future.
Nevertheless, some of the ideas you dream up for the next century may suggest realistic goals for the near future. Yet again, this is an imagination exercise that sometimes provides potential practical benefits.
100 Uses for Your Product/100 New Services A classic creativity exercise is to find 100 uses for a brick, a bucket of water, a bathtub or any other commonplace object. Such exercises stretch your imagination. So, why not try the same, but using one of your products as the focus of the challenge? Get a group together and brainstorm 100 uses for the product.
If you are a service company, that may not be possible. Instead, brainstorm 100 new services you could offer using your existing resources.
This exercise not only stretches the imagination, but focuses it on a key component of your business and so can result in practical ideas which can readily be implemented. It’s rather like bicycling 10 km to the shops and back. Not only do you get exercise, but you get the shopping done as well.
Conclusion
Of course, imagination exercises take up valuable time and do not always bring in immediately usable results. But, just as an athlete must exercise regularly to stay in shape and perform to the best of her abilities, so too must your corporate imagination get regular exercise in order that your employees innovate to the best of their abilities.
Exercise 2:
Now, that we’ve pondered, What is Innovation? in order to come up with a working definition (A New Idea, Creation, Offering or Process that Adds Value), it’s time to ask the big duh question:
How do you come up with that new idea, creation, offering or process that adds value?
The definition of innovation – the quality or attribute that makes innovation different from creativity – suggests that there might be tools and practices that work ESPECIALLY WELL in encouraging innovation specifically.
In other words, certain creativity tools and practices are inherently more adept at fostering “new + value” thinking.
Broken & Brilliant (laying the groundwork for innovative thinking by identifying what's missing) Because innovation includes the creation of additional value, a perfect place to start the process of innovating is to look at the environment in which your idea will exist (at work/in your industry or category/in your customers’ or audiences’ lives, etc.) and ask:
What’s Broken? What’s Brilliant?
What’s Broken? (You’ll notice there is a little repetition in the questions below – often even slightly changing the way you ask something can shift the brain; help you see things from a different angle.)
Ask yourself – Related to my work, industry, category, product/service, creation, customer/audience – or whatever I’m working on:
What’s not working?
What’s not working as well as it could? What could be done better?
What customer or audience needs are not being met?
What are people not saying or doing?
Where are the hiccups, bumps or obstacles – no matter how big or small?
Where is there a gap or a glitch? What’s missing here?
What do I wish existed? What do my customers/audience wish existed?
What needs to change? Design? Smell? Touch? Feel? Taste? Texture? Timing? Style? Performance? Result?
How or where could this (look, smell, feel, go, be) better?
How could this get or be worse?
In finding the gaps, you can find the space to innovate.
What’s Brilliant? (Again, you’ll notice a little repetition.)
Ask yourself – Related to my work, industry, category, product/service, creation, customer/audience – or whatever I’m working on:
What’s perfect? What’s almost perfect?
What’s breakthrough? What’s about to or needs to break through?
What looks, smells, feels, etc., great?
Where is design, performance, style, touch, feel, taste, texture, timing, results top-notch?
What are people saying or doing that tells me this is brilliant?
What does this make me want more of? What does this make my customers/audience want more of?
What do I want my customers/audience to do/say more, or more often?
What do I love about this? What do my customers/audience love about this?
How could this get or be any better?
In finding the perfection, you find the space to innovate even further through the parts that aren’t quite yet as good as they could be. In this way, the What’s Brilliant? questions offer a perspective shift that can help you find additional fodder for your What’s Broken? exploration.
![](http://www.weebly.com/weebly/images/file_icons/xls.png)
innovation_presentation.pptx | |
File Size: | 81 kb |
File Type: | pptx |