Continual Innovation

Establishing terminology and frames of reference helps set the context and construct a solid foundation from which we can have an intelligent conversation about this topic.

Creativity and Innovation are extremely usually confused. For example, 1 popular author recently defined innovation as “…any concept that generates wealth.” That’s lazy thinking.

A excellent definition of creativity is that it is difficulty identification and thought generation whereas innovation is notion selection, development and commercialisation.

Within concept generation, a further definition is valuable: the number of ideas produced, the novelty of the ideas produced, the diversity of ideas produced and the frequency of their production.

Corporate Man

In a lot of lectures, the idea of the Corporate Man rears its head.

The myth of Corporate Man is based on suspect ideas such as a) businesses are not creative, b) managers are not creative / they are automatons, c) Corporate Man is functional and hence cannot be creative.

This idea that companies are not creative is incorrect – they are highly creative entities where goods and services ought to be developed, competitive advantage maintained and profit made etc. These are quite creative activities, specially for senior players. In any one enterprise, hundreds if not thousands of modest to huge troubles need to be solved everyday – individuals are moved from an original state to a objective state, in other words, creativity is an implicit component of everyday activity.

Stereotypes often exist simply because there is truth to them on some level and this should be addressed.

The Corporate Man stereotype, if it applies at all, will do so most usually to much less senior people whose function is closer to maintenance on some level: maintaining the procedure, maintaining the infrastructure, maintaining order, fulfilling functional tasks and so forth. The idea stems from Taylorism and Fordism and the standard manufacturing business, where tasks are made short and basic to enhance overall output. Further, the stereotype applies more to manufacturing than service or knowledge based industries.

Moving along this path we come up against the issue of instilling creative capacity / motivation to the “lower tasks.”

And that leads us to motivation theory, theory X and theory Y.

Learn more…

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Kal Bishop, MBA

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Download the MBA analysis, find out about this topic at http://www.creativity-management.com