executing a new idea to create value
Beijing Maker Carnival (May 2012)
Interview with Mitch Altman
innovator and educator.
video
Beijing High School 景山学校
Interview with Wu JunJie 吴俊杰
ICT Learning
Designer
video
Zhuge Liang Celebrating a Chinese inventor and master strategist.
read more
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Here's where you start...
The challenge with a multi-faceted and ill-defined topic like innovation is to provide an overview so you can start to drive your own learning about it as soon as possible. There are many perspectives on innovation and you should choose to explore the ones that fit your situation, whether you are an innovator-in-training trying to guard against becoming obsolete in life and work or you are making sure your organisation is ready to innovate and reap the rewards.
Innovation Commission brings together the fundamentals of innovation. It is a portal to the resources you need to find out what innovation means for you where you are now. Using video interviews and focused case studies, you can start to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills from authorities, with the attitudes and values already 'baked in'. You can acquire what is essential first and come back later for the merely interesting.
Note: This site and its resources are not actual innovation and neither are the books - they are all only signposts towards how you can inform yourself about innovation and get started doing it yourself.
Innovation is not new, but the current acute need for innovation and the new ways it can be done are new. There are many consequences of widespread availability and use of the Internet. At Innovation Commission we believe that viewing your situation from a pedagogical angle (TM) will bring your focus quickly to what you need to do. The pedgogical angle is to analyse the gap between you and your objectives in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes. Under the INSPIRE tab you can see some success stories. The people featured and the myriad people it took to help achieve their visions all acted to produce something that had not existed before.
You must figure out what actions you will be taking to prepare yourself, prepare your organisation then get to work to achieve your vision. Whether you are undertaking the basic training exercises, using the diagnostic tools or choosing interventions within some of the eight functional modules in your organisation Innovation Commission resources can help you to examine the research so you can formulate actions.
Innovation is in the 'doing'. It is not an end product, it is a way of working which views the work as a continual experiment. Your challenge is to see how little generic input you need from Innovation Commission before you can start trying things out with ideas you already have, to the limit of the trust and budget you already have. Peter Sims has called these trials 'little bets'. You can view a video about him promoting his book about this YouTube Sims on Little Bets from Tim Kastelle's Blog Innovation Leadership Network.
Every time you see something at Innovation Commission, your role is to examine it to see if it can be used in your context, figure out the required changes in knowledge, skills and values it will take in you and others to make it a reality and ensure it catches on and 'travels'.
Your job: see value, make action plan, do it!
If you've already found something at Innovation Commission you want to try, stop reading, close your browser and get on with it.
NOW!
If you haven't, look a little further, find just one thing and then go and try it.
If you understand what Innovation Commission is all about, you will now close your browser and get to work.
Why study innovation?
Staffing and setting an organisation on an innovative course is incorporating a comparative advantage in your marketplace. Acquiring the knowledge, skills and attitudes you need for this process is a way you can distinguish yourself from your competitors.
Just being innovative is not enough - your organisation must also be efficient and good at what it does. You must be providing something your current and future customers or clients will continue to demand in order to simply survive. No niche market can last forever.
Business Objectives:
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Stay in Business (survive)
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Maximise benefits to Stakeholders
Aside from your shareholders, your customers and the general public can be stakeholders too. (consider environmental approvals legislation, triple bottom line and economic externalities). Sometimes the benefits to stakeholders are things in addition to or instead of money.
Themes of Innovation
Recently the world changed to reduce transaction costs in business (and socially), whilst making content widely available. The term 'content' describes what we find on the Internet before we decide what it is [e.g. as factual information, opinion or promotional persuasive writing (propaganda)], so we can verify or filter it before choosing whether/how to act on it. The widespread use of the Internet and the expectation of instant, multimedia global communication has reduced the costs of finding and managing the use of specialised good and services. According to Tapscott (2010), in the 1930s Nobel prize-winning (1991) economist Prof. Ronald Coase highlighted the role of transaction costs in fostering the formation of firms. Now that costs are continuing to fall, firms must continue to re-examine which functions should still be maintained "in-house". Some functions can be maintained in-house for reasons including protecting intellectual property (company processes and trade secrets).
Transaction Costs
These changes mean our living and working environments are changing, adding opportunities in some areas and reducing them in others. There are themes and ways of working which help us to create and exploit new opportunities to add value to our lives. To the extent our responses are new to ourselves or our organisations, we are innovators. The need for innovation is now more acute because of the paradigm shift occurring due to the more widespread use of the Internet.
Using the Internet, producers and consumers are becoming better informed. The social effects of the Internet include the opportunity for ordinary people to get information about their environment, their Government administration and many other things which are important to them and to take part in global discussion on these topics. These trends have also blurred the distinction between buyers and sellers and have empowered the individual in many aspects of their lives. Some businesses have just become possible (eBay, TaoBao) and others are fading (travel agents). Higher standards of corporate behaviour have become valued, as the chances of being 'found out' have increased.
These trends/themes help to organise our thoughts and focus our efforts towards innovation.
These sweeping changes are happening rapidly during this period. Simply making the necessary changes to our personal and business lives and our habitual thought processes requires innovations (and actual changes, obviously). Access to innovation and ability to change are determinants of personal and business success.
It is important to maintain the distinction between the effects of the massive paradigm shift made possible by the Internet and adaptation to these huge changes through innovation.
These trends and changes in the business environment are not innovation. Innovation is what's needed to benefit more than your competitors from the opportunities the trends and changes are creating.
The widespread use of the Internet has brought with it new ways of doing old things as well as enabling new opportunities. Innovation is done differently nowadays and there are some key themes needed to analyse these developments.
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Openness
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Peering
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Sharing
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Global Awareness
Since these themes closely match individual skills and attitudes, they are covered in the Individual Strand
The Bad News
Achieving innovation means you and your organisation will need to do things you have not done before. You will need to change. Your organisation will need to change what it is doing and keep changing into the future. No niche is permanently secure from competition.
Change is difficult for people, so it is difficult for organisations. Your organisation must be able to achieve flexibility in what it produces, try new things, gather customer and supplier feedback and continue to learn from these. It is going to hurt!
Summary of Organisational (Business) Innovation
These obvious-sounding requirements can have far-reaching consequences. Innovation Commission analyses organisational change requirements into consequential actions in eight operational areas (which are inter-dependent in reality).
We hope this will help you to identify the combination of further study, expert external advice, professional development, strategic planning and simply starting work on a new path. You will identify the gaps, devise the plan and assess your progress in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes to be developed for success. It will allow you the opportunity to identify your own critical strengths - the things that must be done that you will find easier to do than other people or for which you are uniquely qualified.
Using the Internet, producers and consumers are becoming better informed. The social effects of the Internet include the opportunity for you to get information about the environment, Government administration and many other things which are important to you and to take part in global discussion on these topics. Consequences also include a blurred distinction between buyers and sellers and empowerment of people in many aspects of their lives.
The widespread use of the Internet has brought with it new ways of doing old things as well as enabling new opportunities. Innovation is done differently nowadays and new features can be summarised under four key themes or trends: Openness, Peering, Sharing and Acting Globally.
Although these can be qualities or behaviours of organisations, they are individual-based because to achieve them people must have specific knowledge, skills and attitudes before they are reflected in the organisations they serve.
The above trends/themes can help to organise our thoughts and focus our efforts towards innovation in our own lives and facilitating innovation in organisations where we work. We hope this site will help you to identify the right combination of further study, expert external advice, professional development, strategic planning and simply starting work on a new path. You will identify the gaps, devise the plan and assess your progress in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes to be developed for success. It will allow you the opportunity to identify your own critical strengths - the things that must be done that you will find easier to do than other people or for which you are uniquely qualified.
Simply making the necessary changes to our personal and working lives and our habitual thought processes requires innovations (and actual changes, obviously). Access to innovation and ability to change are determinants of personal and work-life success. These considerations are also central to the organisational strand.