Category Archives: Question-To-Innovate

How do you measure an innovation ecosystem?

how do you measure an innovation ecosytem?Here’s a recap from our #innochat session on Measuring an innovation ecosystem. Below are the questions we discussed with my own and answers as well as responses from other participants.

Want to read the whole chat? Great! You can find the complete transcript of the chat in PDF.

What are the fundamental outcomes of innovation?

What are the fundamental outcomes of innovation

Innovation is the successful introduction of something new. And fundamentally, it is the direct result of questioning the status quo; that which precedes it. So, when setting out to change the status quo it is useful to ask yourself: what’s the outcome we want?

It’s a basic question, but one that no one seems to think about. Here then, I’ll elaborate on the fundamental outcomes of innovation…

Will Chief Innovation Officers still exist in five years?

Will Chief Innovation Officers still exist in five years?

A recent article in Fast Company touched on the topic of CIOs (Chief Innovation Officer) and how they’ve become more ubiquitous inside large organizations. This is an enterprise innovation tactic years in the making. But, do they actually mean anything?

My take is that in the CEOs call for innovation, there is also a jump for innovation by placing the responsibility for innovation on a single person: the Chief Innovation Officer. Frankly, the Chief Innovation Officer is more akin to placing blame on someone for being “disrupted”; other than the CEO. Why? Because it is a reactive move; not a proactive one.

The CIOs job is to maneuver the business around irrelevance. Giving someone a title can have unintended consequences such as ego driven decision making, which usually leads to blown opportunities and ideas that never had the chance to take off.

And that’s the problem.

If your organization is truly committed to innovation, which it should, then the CEO needs to be the CIO (chief Innovation Officer), period. His job is to set the context for innovation to happen anywhere in the organization; not just R&D, marketing, a team from McKinsey or some special forces team.

There are signs that will tell you when you’ve created an innovation primordial soup, one is ideas are valued more than hierarchy; not the other way around. To be clear, I’m not saying Chief Innovation Officers are worthless, I’m saying we shouldn’t see them as a sign that “innovation” is going to happen.

So, will Chief Innovation Officers still exist in five years? Hopefully not. The better question to ask is, “how might we change organizations so in the next 5 years innovation is expected and not mandated?”.

Bottom line: Innovation can’t be owned or mandated, it needs to be allowed. You can’t tell innovative people to be innovative, but you can let them. Unleash the black sheep and get out of their way; rest assured they’ll innovate.

What is a mindset and why does it matter?

What is a mindset?

If you are really ambitious, I believe that rather than setting out to accumulate as many material things as you can, you should be aiming to spread mindset; a point of view. This blog is very much focused on innovation as a mindset, not as a collection of tools and frameworks that anyone can pickup and magically turn him/herself  into an innovator.