It should be pretty easy to walk into an organization and do an innovation audit — that is, assess the likelihood that an organization can do remarkably new and innovative things. Here’s what I would look for:
- People laugh at new ideas
- Someone who identifies a problem is shunned
- Innovation is the privileged practice of a special group
- The phrase, “you can’t do that because we’ve always done it this way” is used for every new idea
- No one can remember the last time anyone did anything really cool
- People think innovation is about R&D
- People have convinced themselves that competing on price is normal
- The organization is focused more on process than success
- There are lots of baby boomers about, and few people younger than 25
- After any type of surprise — product, market, industry or organizational change — everyone sits back and asks, “wow, where did that come from?”
Innovative companies act differently. In these organizations
- Ideas flow freely throughout the organization
- subversion is a virtue
- success and failure are championed
- there are many, many leaders who encourage innovative thinking, rather than managers who run a bureacracy
- there are creative champions throughout the organization — people who thrive on thinking about how to do things differently
- ideas get approval and endorsement
- rather than stating “it can’t be done,” people ask, “how could we do this?”
- people know that in addition to R&D, innovation is also about ideas about to “run the business better, grow the business and transform the business“
- the word “innovation” is found in most job descriptions as a primary area of responsibility, and a percentage of annual renumeration is based upon achievement of explicitly defined innovation goals
The fact is, every organization should be able to develop innovation as a core virtue — if they aren’t, they certainly won’t survive the rapid rate of change that envelopes us today.
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