Most of us would like to be more innovative right? More creative, better at improvising, ingenious and inventive. Not many people seem to strive for unimaginative or traditional any more. And a good thing too.
In the consulting and facilitating work that I do, often clients ask for an innovative approach. Sometimes this just means - we want all the good stuff, but delivered really cheaply! At other times they really do want some of the principles of leadership (and I do believe that leadership does have enduring principles) delivered in a way that will jazz the principles up and make them more accessible and memorable to a jaded audience.
Clearly I prefer one approach over the other. But what I enjoy most of all, is when an organisation wants to actually work on becoming more innovative.
My view is that there has been tons of rubbish written and said about innovation - hopefully this blog doesn't add to that virtual pile. Too often I hear things like:
Dr Lauchlan Mackinnon, an Australian researcher and consultant, has developed a useful model for thinking about how innovation works. I like it because it builds on the approach of Jules Henri Poincare, a French mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher.
Mackinnon describes four stages of innovation - although in practical terms they may be more iterative than sequential. Mackinnon's four phases are:
I summary - we can work, and work hard on being innovative.
In the consulting and facilitating work that I do, often clients ask for an innovative approach. Sometimes this just means - we want all the good stuff, but delivered really cheaply! At other times they really do want some of the principles of leadership (and I do believe that leadership does have enduring principles) delivered in a way that will jazz the principles up and make them more accessible and memorable to a jaded audience.
Clearly I prefer one approach over the other. But what I enjoy most of all, is when an organisation wants to actually work on becoming more innovative.
My view is that there has been tons of rubbish written and said about innovation - hopefully this blog doesn't add to that virtual pile. Too often I hear things like:
- That's the job of the creative types.
- We don't have time to be innovative.
- We're going to wait until the creative juices start flowing.
- We're not smart enough to think of the 'next big thing'.
Dr Lauchlan Mackinnon, an Australian researcher and consultant, has developed a useful model for thinking about how innovation works. I like it because it builds on the approach of Jules Henri Poincare, a French mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher.
Mackinnon describes four stages of innovation - although in practical terms they may be more iterative than sequential. Mackinnon's four phases are:
- Conscious Activity: The hard work part. Writing down ideas, consciously thinking, calculating, researching, seeking opinions.
- Internalisation: Let the challenge go. If the conscious activity phase is associative, this phase is much more unconscious and disassociative.
- Stimulus of the New: Don't wait for the light to go off from the first two phases, do something to stimulate the current. Read a book not related to the topic. Talk to someone on the bus about it. Re-transcribe all your ideas in some different way using a mind map, a fishbone diagram etc.
- Validation: Check that it will work, and get it ready for implementation.
I summary - we can work, and work hard on being innovative.
