Exnovations place in the innovation life cycle

I was some time back reminded about the term “exnovation” in an interim report prepared for NESTA by the City University, London and the Work Psychology Group entitled “Characteristics & Behaviours of Innovative People in Organizations.”

Exnovation is if you were unaware, is at the end of the innovation life-cycle, where it “discards” or even purges existing practices to allow the organization to adopt different and fresh thinking to any new innovation activities.

A number of writers have discussed exnovation but its first use was attributed to Kimberly in 1981, who described innovation as a series of processes which in combination define an innovation life-cycle (Fiona Patterson, City University for NESTA). Continue reading “Exnovations place in the innovation life cycle”

The real desperate need for innovation

A desperate need for social innovation is where we should focus our energies.

Our past business models are not sustaining us, to take us forward. We have made this ‘rod for our own backs’ by producing thousands of competent managers, risk-averse not risk-taking managers, with our business leaders continually looking over their shoulders or in the rearview mirror who has become a short term in most of their actions. Governments still take ‘adversarial’ positions.

Business still seeks short term results. The end result of much of the activities of the past decade has led us to build a ‘failure framework’, one more sustaining old model being layered on top of other equally outdated approaches, and not the ones that can shift us truly up a gear or two, into a new age of prosperity. Continue reading “The real desperate need for innovation”