The Hard Currency in Uncertain Economic Times - Ideas!

It’s all very well to talk about innovation in times like this. However innovation is intangible and intangibility is not what we need right now.Organizations need evidence, hard numbers that enable them to really understand how they are operating functionally on a daily basis. Yet it is the focus on the ideas that flow around that functionality that create the seeds of innovation.Without that exchange of ideas, organizational stagnation and pessimism set in, morale collapses and passion dies.Thus, the hard currency in these unstable economic times is ideas‼Innovation is invariable viewed as

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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.

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Managing Creativity from An Organizational Economics Perspective

This white paper supports the theory and practice behind the Management Innovation Index by exploring the organizational dilemma of intangibility in innovation and the consequences of ignoring it; proposing a case for a systems thinking approach to organizational creativity to drive measurable innovation; reviewing the importance of the emergence of the new field of organizational economics as a way of analyzing organizations and offers a method for measuring and managing the impact of creativity on the key measures for success of an organization or business in 21st Century.

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Malaysia and Innovation: Why Malaysia Will Become the Innovation Powerhouse of South East Asia

The First Kuala Lumpur Innovation Forum designed and delivered by the Malaysian Foundation for Innovation was an excellent example of collaboration in a secular Islamic state where the common good of the country and its people and their spiritual health is considered tantamout rather than any drive for individual riches and freedoms at any cost. Education, knowledge, understanding, experience and initiative dominated the topics of conversation not the rights and wrongs of a particular political ideology or philosophy.In their new book Leading Innovasian launched at the event, the co-authors and Principal Consultants in Alpha Catalyst Consulting, Azim Pawanchik and Dr. Suraya Sulaiman offer insight as to why this is the case when they compare the culture of Asian innovation practice to the culture of Western innovation practice.

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Creative Recognition and How It Works

It is difficult to know how you are doing in your particular profession when you are working in creativity and innovation. 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 or context over a period of time that you, as a creator, gain distance from 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 work, it’s others.So, against this backdrop, it was very nice to suddenly be approached by IBM saying I had been selected to be one of the 100 IBM Global Creative Leaders and would I be happy to participate in their on going global study on human capital management coming off the back of their 2010 Global CEO Global Study - Capitalising on Complexity: Creative Leadership is the Way To Go!

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