“If you get people to ‘freely’ talk about innovation, its importance, its impact and can ‘paint’ the future in broad brush strokes, they achieve a growing clarity and enthusiasm and that often missing critical component – a sense of shared identity.”
– Paul Hobcraft
“The United States leads the world in innovation because it has created the perfect storm of a risk tolerant citizenry, where failure is sometimes a badge of honor, and a government that invests in basic research, helps to commercialize it, and for the most part tends to go out of the way from a regulatory standpoint.”
– Braden Kelley
“Organizations love to run the aforementioned innovation processes through the middle of the enterprise which is designed to eliminate variation. Think about your metrics, hurdle rates and stage-gate systems and it becomes clear that these practices are designed to created stability through standards, policies and similar controls. Innovation moves from the outside of the bell curve, where risk and reward are reversed, and moves to middle over time.”
– Jeff DeGraff
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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The biggest danger to the cause of advancing innovation when it comes to the engineering and marketing departments is that the relationship develops into one without constructive conflict and without healthy collaboration. For innovation to be repeatable in an organization these two sides must share openly, have their perspectives valued, and contribute to a conversation. Marketing and engineering hear different aspects of the voice of the customer in their interactions with them, and they approach solutions to problems in different ways.
Innovation is about change. Companies that successfully innovate in a repeatable fashion have one thing in common – they are good at managing change. Now, change comes from many sources, but when it comes to innovation, the main sources are incremental innovation and disruptive innovation.
Note that the chart has arrows going in both directions, but not simultaneously. There is a push-pull relationship. At the beginning of the innovation process the satellites influence what the innovation will look like (new production capabilities, new suppliers, ideas from partners/suppliers, component innovations, new marketing methods, etc.). But as the innovation goes into final commercialization, the direction of the change becomes outwardly focused.
The reason that almost every scenario ends up with a centralized innovation group managing innovation is because of the complexity involved in properly managing innovation. A centralized innovation group has the opportunity to continually evolve the innovation understanding of the organization and cascade that knowledge through a set of innovation champions, distributed throughout the organization. A centralized innovation group can also remove most of the innovation management burdens from other groups by taking responsibility for managing the policies, processes, systems and training needs for idea generation, selection, funding, and development. This allows other groups to focus on achieving excellence in their day jobs and coming up with great ideas.
It seems like every organization has a vision and a mission statement, and some even have mantra’s. My personal innovation mantra is to make innovation and marketing insights accessible for the greater good.
Best practices indicate that innovation succeeds best when it is constrained. But for some people, it doesn’t make sense that innovation needs to be constrained. – “Don’t great ideas come from giving people free reign?”