Just a few weeks ago Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Co. opened the first leg of their 2012/13 M-Prize challenge: " Innovating Innovation ." The M-Prize's overall goal is to "surface the world's most progressive management practices and most provocative management ideas" and connect and celebrate individuals reinventing management. This particular challenge — where I'm serving as a judge — seeks "real-world case studies and bold ideas that demonstrate how every element of a company's management model can be retooled to make it innovation-friendly."
Innovation, simply defined, is the process that takes new ideas and implements them in a way that creates value. It's not the same thing as invention, which is an event that occurs at a distinct point in time, often resulting in a single product. Innovation is the extension of invention, the act of bringing things that are invented to market, repeatedly.
For all of the fervor around innovation, far too many organizations are hostile places for new ideas (not to mention the people that harbor them). All too often, new ideas are cooked up in a hothouse environment—the executive inner sanctum, an invitation-only innovation offsite, a limited-access “war room”—and not shared widely until they’ve been sanctioned from on high. When they are offered up by some hardy soul in the trenches, they generally have just one place to go: up the chain of command. In other words, they get the hot lights of judgment before they get a chance to breathe.
How does a Dell engineer’s job change when they get to talk to customers? It opens up an information flow so they can co-create something better. You have to earn the right to sell to somebody. That’s why Dell is building relationships with customers and becoming trustied advisors through the Dell...
When the folks in charge of the MIX told me a few months ago that their next M-Prize would focus on the enable communities of passion moonshot, I was pretty stoked. In our little corner of the MIX, we're always looking for new ideas on how to inspire and build more productive communities. A little...
One of the things that attracted me to Red Hat in the first place was that it was a company with a strong sense of purpose. Red Hat was a company full of believers, people who felt that the open source development model was simply a better way. During my first few months as CEO, I traveled to Red...
Creativity is less an art than a discipline--and surprisingly practical and accessible If you think creativity is the province of a privileged few--the proverbial black turtleneck and pony tail crowd--think again. Our work with hundreds of teams, from CEOs to customer service reps, has convinced us...
Bob Sutton is one of the most provocative, practical, and profoundly human thinkers and writers in the realm of management today. He’s written five important books over the last decade about closing the gap between knowledge and organizational action, evidence-based (rather than faith- or fear-...
Innovation poses two enormous problems for most leaders given the way they are trained to think. First, it’s a time-based form of value. It goes sour like milk. This year’s “must-have” gadget will end up in a landfill next Christmas or at least be overwritten by Version 2.0. Second, innovation only pays in the future for which you presently have no data. As Kierkegaard put it “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
This post originally appeared in Tim O'Reilly's Google+ feed and on O'Reilly Radar . This tweet by Steve Case ( @stevecase ) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death I've been thinking a lot about O'Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that...
