As the competitive landscape changes, companies' survival requires ever more rapid innovation. In a Leadership Excellence article*, Blair Sheppard and Mike Canning talk about the difficult process of generating new ideas that lead to solutions. No longer are innovative solutions the province of a single function or senior leaders: innovation must occur across functions and levels to create a core "organizational capability". That capability entails a process:
- Identify and frame opportunities
- Be insightful about how to approach opportunities
- Improve ideas in cycles of experiments
- Test viable solutions with others to learn more
- Implement solutions of value.
Leaders need both to address immediate problems and to build a culture where curiosity, collaboration and experimentation are the norm, not the exception. The authors posit seven guiding principles:
- Be a student and keep an open mind
- Look beyond big ideas
- Be prepared to focus and work
- Get comfortable with uncertainty
- Increment your way to solutions
- Expect to be under-resourced
- Build a reputation for sharing the credit.
Education —if it is designed and delivered in the context of the organization's pressing strategic challenges — is one of the best accelerators to create such a cultural shift.
These and other notions are covered in detail in the book Discovering Creative Solutions to Everyday Challenges.
* Sheppard, B. and Canning, M. (2006). Innovation culture. Leadership Excellence, January, p. 18.
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