Innovation – creating value from ideas

If there was a system that could help you generate better ideas, retain ideas and know-how, remove barriers, improve the working environment and increase both performance and profits would you be interested?

We believe that such a system exists and we call it Innovation. Our ideas involve the whole organisation from top to bottom and all functional areas – we do not simply focus on invention or technology transfer. Better still, the main resource that we use is one that you already have, a supply of – people!

Even better, we have a methodology for running innovation projects and programmes, a toolkit for measuring your capacity to innovate as well as the know how from working on practical innovation projects.

Our aim is to help your organisation grow and flourish through the application of Creativity and Innovation as business tools. Wouldn’t you like to ensure that creativity and know-how are not walking out of the door and that good ideas are flooding in. Maybe you are not sure how to get started? Read the remainder of this page and then talk to us, we can help.

Please visit our Power and Politics page to read about how power and politics can stifle Innovation in the workplace.

First steps in Innovation

The first steps are to:

• Create a definition of Innovation that works for you
• Measure your current innovation capacity (find out how using the Innovation Toolkit)
• Manage the “Innovation Equation”
• Manage Knowledge effectively
• Un-manage Creativity
• Craft and communicate your strategic objectives
• Create the right environment

Definition of Innovation

This is one of the major problems with any innovation project. What is it? Grappling with such a nebulous idea and then attempting to describe it in a language that only your division or department understands can be fraught with problems. This is why we created the innovation equation – not a rigourous mathematical equation but one which our clients could use to hang their own ideas on. Here it is:

It simply says that Innovation is a function of Creativity and Know-how which is multiplied by a constant alpha and raised to a power n where:

• Creativity is simply the methods and frameworks that we use to create new ideas and knowledge
• Know-how is the things that we already know e.g. company history, libraries, employees skills
• Alpha is composed of two components, a desire or need to innovate and resistance. This can make the results negative!
• The power n is a representation of the maturity level of the frameworks that have been put in place to exploit innovation.

Adopting this pseudo equation/model has far reaching consequences, it allows us to home in on the individual components of Innovation and measure them.