To Live and Breath - Inspiration is Not the Key to Innovation [29Nov10]

“The essence of a creative culture is openness, curiosity, connecting, collaborating, and courage.” - A.G. Lafley

Amplify’d from www.business-strategy-innovation.com

When faced with the challenge of creating a vibrant, innovation-capable culture, many organizations focus their efforts almost entirely on the front end of innovation. Their focus implies that innovation begins and ends with ideation, and their efforts extend little beyond the generation of vast numbers of ideas. Recently, A.G. Lafley, the former CEO of Proctor and Gamble (P&G), spoke at length at the tenth World Business Forum in New York City, about what it took for innovation to be revitalized in the company during his tenure. While the fuzzy front end received attention, it was not the only area of focus. He noted that for innovation to be truly successful, it had to become something the organization lived and breathed. It was not only about the inspiration necessary for a good idea but the habits formed by making innovation processes stable and robust enough that they could be relied upon for the long-term.

The proof of his approach is evident: under Lafley, P&G’s sales doubled, profits quadrupled, and the company’s market value rose by over $100 billion.

Yet organizations continue to believe that if they can only find the right idea, the perfect brainwave, the single market-changing invention, their futures will be bright and rosy. There’s a reason they call it the front end of innovation; there’s a whole back end to innovation that requires effort and discipline and care for the value conceived of in the beginning to actually have any real value.

Inspiration is just a start

“Courage is the missing innovation ingredient for most CEOs.” – A.G. Lafley

Little do they realize that for innovation to truly flourish, the organization itself needs to rally around the support of innovation. That means everything from the generation of ideas to their evaluation, their prioritization and selection, to their testing and assessment and their eventual, planned-for, operation. An innovation-capable enterprise doesn’t only pay attention to the seed of an idea, they nurture that notion until it thrives of its own accord.

Let’s be clear: the reasons so many organizations choose to focus on the creation of new ideas are: a) it’s fun, and b) the effort involved is minimal when compared to all the associated activities required to afford it a chance of success. Read more at www.business-strategy-innovation.com

 

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