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."
With me being an active participant within the MIX community, I am being humbled and honored to see that the theme behind the current MIX challenge (i.e.
Innovation is the process of brining the new into the world. And the new cannot come from the mind, i.e through thinking. If you carefully understand the mind, it consists of only knowledge.
Game-changing innovation is a beautiful thing. Disruptive products and services are unleashed. New markets are created. Customers smile, employees cheer and shareholders win. What’s not to like?
Management thinking is inherently faddish, but there are some perennial favourites that never fall out of favour. Innovation is one those evergreen themes: it is a rare CEO who doesn’t list innovation as one her top four or five priorities.
Everyone is struggling to identify a way to make innovation repeatable, sustainable. But, unfortunately most thought leaders make potentially useful innovation frameworks unnecessarily complex.