Idea and Innovation Blog

Innovation as a sustainable and viral process is proving more elusive for some than first envisioned. It is becoming apparent to newer practitioners that certain key elements need to be omnipresent for the goodness to not only happen, but to last.

Unless you change your entire organization overnight, which too has proven more challenging to achieve rather than just decree stating it will be so, there's a good chance that enterprise innovation will fight an uphill battle.

The problem for most is that everyone appears too busy to mobilize for a bunch of good ideas - however, what captures their attention and gets their commitment are great ideas that provide faster decision-making. The reason for this phenomenon is that so few ideas arrive at the finish line in decision-ready and/or market prepared state. The steps for incremental validation of a great idea are the booster-stations that promote momentum. It is imperative to create the mechanism to enable this development to occur organically yet in a structured fashion by leveraging the different skills, motivation, interest, affinity and discretionary labor available through your participant community - trying to silo the effort hamstrings ideas in terms of creativity, diversity and speed of execution.

In short, innovation cannot run itself - it takes the participation of community comprised of passionate, interested, engaged and committed stakeholders; regardless of its size or make-up. And contrary to popular belief, this community need not massive in scale to achieve significant results; it only needs the have right players around the table.

A little effort and support at the out set goes along way to cultivate this environment and achieve the desired outcomes.