I am frustrated with companies (well, really leaders) that spend absolutely no time, money or resources on creating an innovative culture. What I mean by that is, placing importance on things like: actually listening to employee suggestions and doing something about them, understanding that customer complaints = an amazing opportunity to create a new value stream (or of course fix your old one!), when someone asks “why are we doing it that way” you don’t kill them - you praise them! Innovation is everywhere:

• Entrepreneur magazine - article about a new emerging CIO position (Chief Innovation Officer)
• Business Week - talk of a new non-profit focused on service innovation
• Harvard Business Online - on being a serial innnovation manager

We have to change the way we do business to be able to compete in this global marketplace. We have gotton so lazy and complacent in our processes and thoughts. I absolutely love to hear about companies that understand the importance of actually scheduling in innovation time - and the time is not always focused on an issue at hand. Also the companies that designate a Innovation ROOM where people can go and get creative. A must read: Business Week’s August 20 & 27 article, The Future of Work. You will buy into being an innovation junkie.

mt

mtaylor@notsobasictraining.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.