Innovation
From GPWiki
Friday 10 of September, 2010
"Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems." - Tim Brown, 2005
Innovation - A major component of our life, everybody wants it (mostly), few truly understand how to do it and there are many definitions of it. We've collected a few examples of what we think defines innovation - of course we try to deliver it for our clients through our own work.
See Innovating Your Business System
Innovation has been studied in a variety of contexts, including in relation to technology, commerce, social systems, economic development, and policy construction. There are, therefore, naturally a wide range of approaches to conceptualizing innovation in the scholarly literature.
"When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design." —Bruce Nussbaum, 2005
Recent authors point out that invention - the creation of new tools or the novel compilation of existing tools - is often confused with innovation. Many product and service enhancements may fall more rigorously under the term improvement. Change and creativity are also words that may often be substituted for innovation.
Note in this view inventions may be concepts, physical devices or any other set of things that facilitate an action. An innovation in this light occurs whether or not the act of innovating succeeds in generating value for its champions. Innovation is distinct from improvement in that it causes society to reorganize. It is distinct from problem solving and is perhaps more rigorously seen as new problem creation. And in this view, innovation applies whether the act generates positive or negative results.
Innovation in organizations
Innovation typically involves creativity, but is not identical to it: innovation involves acting on the creative ideas to make some specific and tangible difference in the domain in which the innovation occurs. For example, Amabile et al (1996) propose: "All innovation begins with creative ideas . . . We define innovation as the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization. In this view, creativity by individuals and teams is a starting point for innovation; the first is necessary but not sufficient condition for the second".
For innovation to occur, something more than the generation of a creative idea or insight is required: the insight must be put into action to make a genuine difference, resulting for example in new or altered business processes within the organisation, or changes in the products and services provided.
Technological concepts of innovation
From this point of view the emphasis is moved from the introduction of specific novel and useful ideas to the general organizational processes and procedures for generating, considering, and acting on such insights leading to significant organizational improvements in terms of improved or new business products, services, or internal processes.
Through these varieties of viewpoints, creativity is typically seen as the basis for innovation, and innovation as the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization. From this point of view, creativity may be displayed by individuals, but innovation occurs in the organizational context only.
It should be noted, however, that the term 'innovation' is used by many authors rather interchangeably with the term 'creativity' when discussing individual and organizational creative activity. As Davila et al (2006) comment, "Often, in common parlance, the words creativity and innovation are used interchangeably. They shouldn't be, because while creativity implies coming up with ideas, it's the "bringing ideas to life" . . . that makes innovation the distinct undertaking it is." The distinctions between creativity and innovation discussed above are by no means fixed or universal in the innovation literature. They are however observed by a considerable number of scholars in innovation studies.
