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Business Innovation – Real Self versus the Trained Self
Personalities can be said to be psychotic in many ways and one of those is the idea, readily accepted, that we have at least two selves: the real self and that self which we present to the world.
Creativity can be defined as problem...
Dish Network - Business Strategy Principles for your Home Business
Dish Network boasts an impressive clientele of more than nine million monthly subscribers. Significantly, though they are only the second largest distributor of satellite television service, they have been voted #1 in customer service by J.D. Power...
Domestic Merchant Account Options
A domestic merchant account may be the best option for your
company. That's because when you have an account managed by a
company located in your country of residence, both you and the
lender are familiar with laws and business codes that can...
Imagine If Everyone Working In Your Office Was In Synch?
Microsoft-Outlook is a pretty amazing program. So much more than simply an e-mail client, it provides a task list, a powerful calendar with recurring scheduling capabilities, wonderful electronic sticky notes, mail-merge capability with MS-Word ...
The Passive, Inwardly Focused Organization
In a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article the three authors (Neilson, Pasternack, and Van Nuys) described what they called the "Passive-Aggressive Organization." While we are all familiar with the concept of the passive-aggressive...
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Managing Creativity and Innovation part 1 of 2
Leaders, consultants and managers must be competent in at least thirteen domains to even begin effectively managing creativity and innovation. Part 1 of Managing Creativity and Innovation covers the first seven of these domains.
a) The difference between creativity and innovation. Often used interchangeably, the two must be thought of as separate and distinct. One definition for creativity is that it is problem identification and idea generation, whilst innovation is best described as idea selection, development and commercialisation. These definitions alone imply at least six competencies (including one holistic). At a minimum, the differences mean that, at each stage, varying skills, processes and structures are required.
b) The size and richness of idea pools. Initially creative thinking is used to generate an idea pool and then critical thinking reduces those ideas to feasible ones. To maximise the quantity and quality of the idea pool, a conscious application of processes and techniques must be applied. Some of these include
i)Using a variety of stimuli and frameworks to open up pathways
ii)Not stopping when a good idea seems to present itself
iii)Consciously stimulating change in direction
iv)Distinguishing between the numbers of ideas produced, their novelty, diversity and frequency of production.
c) Creative types. There is common belief that some people just are more creative and certain theorists argue for creativity characteristics such as tolerance of ambiguity and intolerance for conformity. However, traits are notoriously difficult to detect and not stable nor transferable across situations. Also, motivation is thought to be more important than traits – this is similar to possessing high intelligence - one must be motivated to improve and apply it.
d) Learning versus Talent. Can creativity be learned and developed or is it a natural talent or gift? The best way to answer this question is to investigate whether creativity improves with practice. The experience curve, automisation, learning theories and the experiences of practitioners suggest that people do get better at generating more, better, diverse and novel ideas - but there are caveats, such as an increase in path dependency and peaks and troughs in motivation.
e) Motivation. Someone with natural ability or placed in the right environment may not take advantage of it unless motivated. Intrinsically motivated individuals tend to expend more effort and create
more output and synergistic extrinsic motivation better enables a person to complete an endeavour. On the other hand, non-synergistic extrinsic motivation leads to a person feeling controlled and manipulated and is incompatible with intrinsic motivation. Specific motivators such as material reward, progress to the ideal self, self-determination, self-evaluation, feedback, enjoyment, competency expansion, recognition and feasibility can all be quantitatively measured and monitored.
f) Organisational Culture. We can all be more creative, so what is stopping us? Often people complain of some degree of evaluation apprehension – this manifests itself in many ways but two of the most common are a fear of seeming unintelligent or unoriginal. Some cultures are more risk averse than others, others do not manage competition well and yet others engender friction by misallocating resources.
g) Organisational structure. Many theories argue that certain structures, such as hierarchical and mechanistic, hinder creativity and innovation. Whilst these theories generally tend towards validity, there are many reasons why a business has a particular organisational structure - history, logistics, market segmentation, product line, strategy and so forth – therefore it is unreasonable to ask a firm to change it. Ultimately, what managers need, is a knowledge of the properties of a fostering structure so that they may incorporate those elements into their existing one.
This field yields much interesting data. For example, many respondents argued that all structures, even those so-called flat structures, are in reality hierarchical.
Some very simple changes can be implemented. These include:
i)Direct communication links to decision makers.
ii)Cross-divisional information flow.
iii)Tangible progress of ideas.
Part 2 of Managing Creativity & Innovation will discuss Group Structure, Knowledge, Networks and Collaboration, Radical and Incremental Creativity and Innovation, Structure and Goals, Process and Valuation.
Kal Bishop, MBA, http://www.managing-creativity.com
About the Author
Kal Bishop is a management consultant based in London, UK. He has consulted in the visual media and software industries and for clients such as Toshiba and Transport for London. He has led improv, creativity and innovation workshops, exhibited artwork in San Francisco, Los Angeles and London and written a number of screenplays. He is a passionate traveller.
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| DTI - Welcome to the DTI's Innovation Home Page |
| The DTI is working to stimulate a significant increase in innovation throughout ... It covers Living Innovation, web streaming of a series of high profile ... |
| www.dti.gov.uk |
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| Innovation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| An innovation in this light occurs whether or not the act of innovating ... A convenient definition of innovation from an organizational perspective is ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
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| National Innovation Website |
| The Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources has developed this website to raise awareness of the importance and benefits of innovation and ... |
| www.innovation.gov.au |
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| Innovation, creativity and brainstorming resources from ... |
| A comprehensive site designed to provide busy entrepreneurs with a focused collection of the best resources on innovation, creativity, and brainstorming. |
| www.innovationtools.com |
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| Innovation Weblog - Trends, resources, viewpoints from Chuck Frey ... |
| The Innovation Weblog - Valuable trends, resources and viewpoints in innovation, creativity and brainstorming from Chuck Frey at InnovationTools. |
| www.innovationtools.com |
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| CORDIS: Innovation Portal: Home |
| This Innovation Portal is supported by DG ENTR of the European Commission, ... European Commission adopts new Communication on Innovation: on 13 September ... |
| cordis.europa.eu |
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| CORDIS: Promotion of Innovation: Home |
| This programme stands at the cross-roads of the Community's policies on Research, Innovation and SMEs. |
| cordis.europa.eu |
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| Innovation Network... leveraging innovation, creativity and ... |
| The Innovation Network is an association of companies and employees committed to innovation. The site features some interesting articles as well as some fun ... |
| www.thinksmart.com |
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| Business Innovation : Car Reviews, Online Gaming, and Product Branding |
| If your in need of great Online Gaming material, we carry up to the minute news and reviews for all of your favorite games and gaming systems. |
| www.businessweek.com |
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| Innovation - Life, Inspired | PBS |
| Learn about fascinating innovations, explore interactive features, submit questions to our experts, investigate resources and lesson plans, and more. |
| www.pbs.org |
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| Innovation.org - Welcome |
| Impact of Innovation Saving & Improving Lives Controlling Healthcare Costs Strengthening ... Future of Innovation New Medicines in Development Next Wave of ... |
| www.innovation.org |
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| Innovation: See what people are saying right now on Technorati |
| See all blog posts tagged with innovation on Technorati. |
| www.technorati.com |
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| Innovation Relay Centres - The World Largest Network for ... |
| Innovation Relay Centres giving advice on Innovation, Technology Transfer and Exploitation. Major European source for innovative technologies or new ... |
| irc.cordis.lu |
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| The Tech Museum of Innovation | Welcome |
| The Tech Museum of Innovation - Welcome! The Tech Museum inspires and educates the innovators of the future. |
| www.thetech.org |
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| Pages tagged with "innovation" on del.icio.us |
| CoDev 2007 - Co-Development for Business Growth: Open Innovation and Alternatives ... PDMA & IIR's 5th Annual Front End of Innovation ... |
| del.icio.us |
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| innovation |
| Publication highlighting the research activities of NUS. The site provides snippets of selected articles online, and provides a subscription form online. |
| www.innovationmagazine.com |
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| Canadian Innovation Centre |
| Services includes invention evaluation, technology due diligence, market research, and education programs. |
| www.innovationcentre.ca |
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| London INNOVATION :: Home |
| Maximise your business potential through innovation. Learn the secrets of successful business innovation in London. |
| www.london-innovation.org.uk |
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| Eric Von Hippel's Homepage |
| Downloadable Books. Democratizing Innovation (2005) ... The Sources of Innovation (1988). Free download of the complete book. Permission granted by Oxford ... |
| web.mit.edu |
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| Intel Innovation in Education |
| www.intel.com/education/ - 3k - Cached - Similar pages |
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