Walkabouts are needed for learning and testing ourselves

Walkabout picture
photo credit: Walkabout (1971) film by Nicolas Roeg

How often do you pause for thought, testing yourself, questioning even simply for ‘just those few minutes,’  to allow yourself to openly challenge where you are and what you are attempting to do?

We keep relentlessly moving on, like a wandering herd of buffalo, always looking for fresh pasture, those new feeding grounds. It’s not good.

Of course, I often get caught up in this restless pursuit of gathering more, when I spend a growing amount of my time researching innovation. I keep coming across so many things that ‘trigger’ the thinking, pushing me on.

Do you let them go, ignore them, quickly pass over them, or attempt to capture the issue as something well worth investigating further at a later stage, or just get them simply behind you in the here and now.
Continue reading “Walkabouts are needed for learning and testing ourselves”

The Innovating Era: Creative Destruction or Destructive Creation?

Creative Destruction
We have been entering some perilous times recently and I can’t imagine when Joseph Schumpeter outlined his groundbreaking efforts for explaining “creative destruction” he or anyone else, could imagine this being flipped around to what we are facing more today, in a more innovative era, that of “destructive creation”.

Schumpeter saw “creative destruction” as the renewing, through new innovation, society’s dynamics that would lead to higher levels of economic development and welfare.

At the same time recognizing that this destroyed a few of the incumbents to the benefit of many more newcomers and increasing value creation for broader society.

Today it seems we are caught in the reverse of this- the process of “destructive creation”- where it benefits a few rather than the many. This sets out often to destroy or greatly diminish the usage value of existing products and services before it is optimal to actually do so, and in the process incurring often significant costs not taken into account at the time.

These unforeseen issues have consequences that negatively affect parts of society not foreseen or contemplated at the time. Continue reading “The Innovating Era: Creative Destruction or Destructive Creation?”

Accelerating the evolution of Innovation Management PLEASE!

Sometimes you become concerned, this is one of those moments. I’m getting concerned that we need to take some urgent action.

The Corporate Innovation Manager- is stuck in the middle.

Recently I was going through a report, a very helpful one, by link  http://bit.ly/gWqmO7 supplied by www.innovationmanagement.se on the Corporate Innovation Function- key findings and detailed results, commissioned by HEC Paris.

I was also reading  some views expressed by  Reinhard Büscher, Head of Innovation Policy at the European Commission, http://bit.ly/eB02ZR on the role of the innovation manager (IM).

Both paint a rather dismal picture of the position of the Innovation Manager within organizations- very fuzzy not yet well defined.
Continue reading “Accelerating the evolution of Innovation Management PLEASE!”