The Digital Toolbox Landscape

The recent report Navigating The Digital Future, part of Booz & Company's Global Innovation 1000 2013, whilst superfical in many senses, is an important piece of work and worth reading - one of the better pieces of research around the emerging digital technology driving the future of innovation.

Why An Organization Should Build Its Own Digital Innovation Process and How It Can

Every organization is systemically and uniquely creative, made up of its employees’ cumulative creative capabilities and experiences. To make innovation work in that context requires a way of devising an organizational framework that recognizes the unique creative contribution of each person whilst fitting it into the individual uniqueness of the organization’s creative culture as a whole. Digital collaboration technologies, currently the digital rage such as ideation platforms (the process of creating and capturing ideas), take a one shoe fits all approach to organizational creativity, regardless of the inherent uniqueness of the creative culture of the organization. Further, ideation platforms create disruption to organizational process when they are layered onto existing technology infrastructure currently driving the organization. Unless there is genuine intrinsic motivation for an employee to participate, the ideation platform will die along with the innovation initiative, subsumed into the myriad of current digital technology processes employees are required to engage with on a daily basis. My recent research shows a failure rate as high as 80% on money spent

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Strategic Thinking and Creativity: A Little Idea With A Long History

It is difficult to know how to assess your work when you are being creative. Creativity in whatever endeavour or context is ruled by small continual loops of perception, judgment and reflection. It is not until you create a body of work in whatever practice over a long period of time that you, as a creator, gain distance and thus an understanding of your work. Even then you begin to wonder whether the work has any immediate or long term value or has made meaningful connections or sense with or for others. As a creator, it is not you who judges the effectiveness and quality of your creativity, it’s others. I was reminded of this last week when

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Data, Digital, Discovery - the Future of Innovation

Two recent examples show how digital disruption is having a huge impact on traditional businesses and business models and how rapidly innovation as a practice and process will need to change to keep up with the impact. Over the last two years, one of Australia’s largest publicly owned talent management organizations has seen one of its major client’s spend fall from A$30million per annum to $15million per annum, with expectations the total spend year ending 2012 will be around $5million. For any company this is a huge drop in revenue and as the Managing Director said “It is not only a huge drop in revenue for us, it is a huge drop in revenue for the total HR industry in Australia.” This contraction has come about because of

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