Innovation - Think Strategically

I was looking around at what people are saying about innovation and I saw this - it fits with what the corporate space should think about - from Fast Company:

Many companies that muffle innovation make some very simple mistakes:

1) Innovation (or new business development or corporate venturing or whatever you call it) is a flavor-of-the-month sort of thing. There's no consistent advocate; the process moves in fits and starts, and just as you are actually learning something, an urgent crisis causes the program to be shut down.

2) Launching a major new business is seen to be the only legitimate goal of innovation. Sure, that's great, but my colleagues and I have learned that the real benefit of innovation is often to keep your company on top in fast-moving core markets. Other benefits include patentable ideas, development of innovative people, spin-offs with economic value, and valuable learning that can lead to a success the next time around.

3) The role middle managers play in the innovation process is ignored. These folks and their networks are often the first to hit the chopping block in a corporate downsizing, but without them, innovation comes to a crashing halt.

4) Conventional disciplines -- financial benefits, career rewards, performance reviews, promotions -- are applied to uncertain new businesses. Our thesis in a forthcoming book is that established companies have most of what they need to innovate and grow, except for the right disciplines.

The Future of Creativity and Innovation

I am interested in creativity and innovation and where the two intersect. So I plan to cover this topic for a while. First I looked at a definition of creativity and Wikipedia, of course, provided a good start.

Wikipedia says, in part, "Creativity (or "creativeness") is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. An alternative, more everyday conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. Unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.

Okay, now to the section on innovation that compares the two, "It is often useful to explicitly distinguish between creativity and innovation. Creativity is typically used to refer to the act of producing new ideas, approaches or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context. In the context of an organization, therefore, the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term creativity is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel ideas by individuals or groups, as a necessary step within the innovation process."

With opportunities to be innovative in today's world, it is interesting to note that companies are careful to define ownership of innovations by employed staff - so that the creator of an innovative idea within that environment really does not own this idea or concept, no matter how original it may be. Unless these companies begin to provide equity into these ideas, more and more innovators will work freelance and the fabric of the creative and innovative team environment will decline.