Re-thinking Innovation, 4 Innovation Myths

There’s a temptation to see innovation as the fun side of business, the nice bits where you get to use your creativity (instead of all that execution stuff). Innovation though has to be rethought as a discipline that’s distinct from cheer leading or brainstorming or crowd sourcing. So what are the top 4 assumptions we need to get rid of?



1. It’s about creativity – recent research shows that creative people are the least likely to be seen as leadership material. If creativity is your bag, you are less likely to be perceived as a natural leader.

Reality: it is about creativity but on a scale that opens up opportunities that we all need to grasp.

2. Innovation is about motivation – or you can cheerlead companies to success. A lot of innovation writing comes back to an over simplified belief that it all comes down to motivating people to get things done differently. But many of the critical innovations we need will – or will not – take place in companies of huge scale and complexity. Innovation is not so much about motivation and creativity as it is dependent on being able to scale new attitudes and also scale training.

Reality: to get there we need a discipline called ‘innovation management.’

3. Innovation is about the user, or the designer or being open, or any other single facet of change. For many of our most important organizations however innovation depends on being able to manage a matrix of factors all of which are changing. It is about users, designers, openness, social dynamics, ingenuity, the lab, and many other factors.

Reality: the matrix of requirements means we need CIOs to work out what system or platforms will deliver on the management need.

4. Innovation is about building better products or services. In reality innovators fail 70 – 80% of the time. Innovation is really about how you manage the development and selection process through successive failures, which is often mundane.

Reality: There’s no safe way to become a risk taker

I think we should treat innovation as a new management discipline, what do you think?