Understanding The Discipline of Innovation

Last week I had the opportunity to run a workshop “An Understanding of Innovation, Its Application and Implementation” in Jakarta, Indonesia for 10 CIOs from some of the world’s largest multi-national companies – industries represented included airline, auto-manufacturing, consumer products, petroleum, pharmaceutical, transport and logistics.

Four interesting findings about innovation to emerge from the workshop.

1) Most large organizations have or have had innovation processes in the form of idea programmes in place. They work to varying degrees, none appear highly successful.

2) Most organizational innovation produces isolated successes, yet does not sustain organizationally over long periods. I used a case study with a 6 year life cycle and that represented a lengthy period according to the participants.

3) None of the innovation programmes discussed had benchmarking or on-going measurement associated with them enabling decision makers to value organizational innovation. Once the innovation had been implemented, it was regarded simply as a part of the business regardless of its impact. As a result, it appears decision makers in organizations are not able to meaningfully assess over time the value of innovation programmes or processes.

4) Whilst innovation programmes might be considered part of an organization’s core values. if they don’t have senior leadership driving them in a coherent and disciplined manner, they have little chance of being considered truly strategic and are likely to die if there is a change in leadership.

The workshop was highly successful in surfacing some new thinking around the discipline of organizational innovation and I would like to share the thinking with you.

I am hosting a global webinar “Understanding the Discipline of Innovation in Organizations" on January 12, 2012 (EST USA) focusing on how to build a strategic innovation capability that can be understood, measured, valued and sustained.

To attend, register here http://udoi.eventbrite.com