The opening bait on innovation

We are living in exciting times. Recently, Gary Hamel was in town (Mumbai, India) and evangelized on innovation. It is well known that the age of Quality (the Six Sigma era) is effectively over now. Quality is now the tool of survival, not differentiation. Creativity and innovation are the only differentiating factors today.

As a creativity facilitator, I have noticed several misconceptions on these topics. In this mail, I shall cover some basics and then build up gradually.
First and foremost, both these terms are taken as synonyms, which is incorrect. Creativity is the creation of the million dollar idea, while innovation refers to the process by which the million dollar idea actually get converted to a million dollars. As you would have noticed, creativity is mostly in the minds of individuals and is a cognitive matter. Innovation, on the other hand, is mostly an organisational process, a means to ‘manage the creativity’.

Some more modern findings of these topics are as follows-
Today, creativity is a learnable and teachable subject. And the encouraging news is that creativity is not hampered by the demands of discipline. Since it is a technique based approach, discipline actually helps. Those who follow laid down directions, do better at creativity than those who take an intuitive approach.
It is also established that the problem is not really of lack of ideas with employees. Most of them are bursting with ideas. Organizations are just unable to tap into them. What we need is an effective idea management system.
Creativity and innovation is no longer restricted to development of products. Innovation is now spreading to all areas of business – marketing, HR, operations, finance, brand management, channel management etc. To clarify this, Professors Mohanbir Sawhney, Robert C. Wolcott and Inigo Arroniz in the MIT Sloan Management Review (Spring 2006) introduce their Innovation Radar. The radar features four major dimensions that serve as business anchors:
i. Offerings a company creates (WHAT).
ii. Customers it serves (WHO).
iii. Processes it employs (HOW).
iv. Points of Presence it uses to take its offerings to market (WHERE).


Alok Asthana
www.mind-skills.com
alokasthana@yahoo.com
91-22-25308265, 91-9821677859