---
title: "How can you be innovative?"
canonical: https://jimcarroll.com/2007/11/how-can-you-be-innovative/
updated: 2007-11-22T14:00:28+00:00
---

# How can you be innovative?

![innovation-insight.jpg](/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/innovation-insight1.jpg)You become innovative by identifying obvious and not-so-obvious trends that will impact your business or organization — and then undertake change and actions to deal with those trends.

Earlier this summer, I taped a podast for Applix; they’re a business intelligence company, that was bought up by Cognos, which was then bought up by IBM for $5 billion just over a week ago.

The podcast focuses on my ideas of the need for corporate agility in the high velocity economy. I cover a lot of ground here in terms of concepts of innovation. In particular, I stress that I think a lot of organizations that I deal with aren’t really thinking about “what comes next?” – which means they are missing the very essence of how to start thinking about innovation:”

*I think we’re still very short-term minded out there. I think a lot of organizations are just going from quarter to quarter*.

What should forward oriented organizations be thinking about? Several things:

*How quickly is our marketplace changing? How quickly are our products changing? What do we need to do from a cultural perspective and an organizational perspective, to be able to deal with a world in which our product life cycles are collapsing? A lot of organizations who don’t appreciate the new forms of competition that can walk into their marketplaces’ business models continue to evolve.*

How do they do that? By making innovation core to their “soul.”

*The word ‘innovation’ has to be a part of the responsibility of everybody in the organization and that’s what I find goes wrong in a lot of companies. I think what has happened is people have made innovation out to be one of these special things that it’s the people in the back room who design new products – that that’s innovation. To me, innovation is so much more than that.*

/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Applix-JimCarroll.pdf

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