The Secret Formula: Building Innovation Into Your Organization

Success depends on both what you do and how you do it. There are specific elements that help you and your company to be more innovative. But it's not a matter of simply following directions. The 'secret formula' is actually not very formulaic. It's  blend of culture, methodologies, infrastructure, and work practices.¹⁰

Innovation – the Key to Success and Survival

Leaders of successful, high-growth companies understand that innovation is what drives growth, and innovation is achieved by awesome people with a shared relentless growth attitude and shared passion for problem solving and for turning ideas into realities.

The Power of Passion

Companies that continuously innovate will create and re-invent new markets, products, services, and business models – which leads to more growth. Innovation is founded on your enterprise's ability to recognize market opportunities, your internal capabilities to respond innovatively, and your knowledge base.

The Tao of Value Innovation

So, the best thing to do to guarantee growth is to build a sustainable innovation organization around the following components:

1. Vision and strategy for innovation

2. Culture supporting innovation

3. Processes, practices and systems supporting innovation

4. Top management team leading innovation

5. Cross-functional teams mapping innovation road

6. Empowered employees driving innovation.

 Best Practices  Google: 10 Golden Rules

Encourage creativity. Google engineers can spend up to 20 percent of their time on a project of their choice. There is, of course, an approval process and some oversight, but basically we want to allow creative people to be creative. One of our not-so-secret weapons is our ideas mailing list: a companywide suggestion box where people can post ideas ranging from parking procedures to the next killer app. The software allows for everyone to comment on and rate ideas, permitting the best ideas to percolate to the top... More

Finding the Right Balance Between Bureaucracy and Chaos

To jazz up your ability to innovate, turn to jazz – the improvisation-driven model for innovation project management.

This model doesn’t discard structure, just as there is a clear structure to good jazz. Successful organizations balance bureaucratic processes at one extreme with the fluid creative chaos of relationships, interests and transactions, which enable it to be innovative and alive, at the other... More

Cross-Functional Teams Leading Innovation

In the new era of systemic innovation, it is more important for an organization to be cross-functionally excellent than functionally excellent. Firms which are successful in realizing the full returns from their technologies and innovations are able to match their technological developments with complementary expertise in other areas of their business, such as manufacturing, distribution, human resources, marketing, and customer relationships. To lead these expertise development efforts, cross-functional teams, either formal or informal, need to be formed. These teams can also find new businesses in white spaces between existing business units.