Innovation in Organisations

innovation Mind Map by Paul Foreman http://www.mindmapinspiration.com

I am currently preparing templates (using Harrison Assessments) to select the most suitable people to attend a high level program on Innovation. We are calling them Innovation Success Formulas. Now, there is nothing like a focused activity such as this to set me thinking in spare time about the topic. Innovation, I believe, is a critical component of the long-term viability of any business/ organisation.

Innovation is not only the conception of new products and services. It can be the creation of new processes that streamline your business, a radically different structure that will ensure goals are more readily met and strategies are successful. It can be about the mix of people that you employ, where and how they are seated, the hours that are worked, management and leadership techniques, and so forth. It can be within your branding and marketing. It is not only about product and services, it is about how, why and where you do business, and with whom, in order to achieve greater business results and financial benefit.

Ideas are the raw material for the process of innovation.  Innovation in any area, starts with an idea and proceeds through the stages of making that idea concrete, practical and profitable.  It results in a successful outcome, a solution, or a successful state of affairs. Another way to think of it is that creativity is a mental activity, while innovation is the broader process of make that mental activity bear fruit.  Innovation includes the process of creativity and much more.  It includes all the stages of progress required to bring about a new reality. — Karl Albrecht, The Creative Corporation, 1987