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“Innovation is not a process, but an outcome.”
The Forbes Leadership Forum brings renowned speakers and thought leaders who discuss their leadership strategies. As a speaker at the Forum, Gower Author Alexander Manu was interviewed by Shaku Selvakumar for the IBM Impact 2011 Blog. In this interview Manu discusses in-depth the concepts of Imagination and Innovation in business Extract:
The redefinition of innovation as a human behaviour outcome, a dynamic in constant change, requires the shaping of new responses in business and the economy.
The past understanding of what innovation “is”, was generally connected with a breakthrough in technology – some new tool being employed in some new way. This understanding limits the potential of innovation as bound by the tools employed, instead of the imagination employing them. The latent imagination triggered by an innovation outcome is the true goal of innovation. It is not what “I can do with this now”? but “what can I become doing this in the future”? The tool is not a response, but a question. Every innovation is a question. The truly important innovations are a series of questions.
A few definitions: Innovation is an outcome, a new behaviour, a new way of doing things. Disruption is a behavior – an outcome involving a media and a user – changed by invention. Invention is a moment of discovery or creation of something new. Disruptive Business means the sum of new behaviours and their support models. Innovation is a moment of use, a manifest behaviour that engages an innovation object into new uses, and modifies the habitual conditions of the present.
This position challenges the current understanding of innovation, and some of the labels applied to innovation typologies, such as the label “disruptive innovation”. In general, the current discourse around innovation addresses competently the technology side of an invention, at the expense of the motivational side of the user, the human motivation which leads in the behaviour of use.
Alexander Manu is Chief Imaginator and Senior Partner at InnoSpa. He is the author of Distruptive Business: Desire, Innovation and the Re-design of Business published by Gower.
“We have been pleased to select Kensei Hiwaki’s book Culture and Economics in the Global Community for a prestigious 2011 Book of the Year Award, because we feel that his book provides many new insights into the complexity of important socio-economic issues, significantly enhances our understanding of the relationship between diverse cultures and sustainable development, and shows how new innovative strategies can be 
used to help us successfully solve a variety of many, seemingly intractable/unsolvable economic problems.”
Prof. Dr. George Lasker, President, International Institute for Advanced Studies
p.s. Kensei Hiwaki discusses discusses sustainability and the future. in this you tube clip mentioned in a previous blog. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCkGo5ojRa4
Whether a candidate or an HR specialist, I encourage you to take a moment to visit Mark Parkinson’s web page on practice psychometric and university admission tests. Alongside practical advice on a wide variety of tests and explanations of the most common types of test, you’ll find links to a battery of different practice tests to try. Mark Parkinson is author of Using Psychology in Business.
The A&DC website is a treasure trove of information for anyone involved in assessment and development centres – or indeed other technical aspects of recruitment and development. They offer a series of free white papers including material on the background and value to assessment centres, introductions to specialist techniques such as appreciative enquiry or the use of situational judgement tests. They also have a separate section on the website with an eclectic and thoughtful series of ‘advice guides’. Well worth a visit! Nigel Povah of A&DC is co-author of Assessment and Development Centres (Second Edition, 2004) and co-editor of the forthcoming Assessment and Development Centres: Strategies for Global Talent Management.
Arguably not the most dynamic and explosive of revolutions but one that we depend on if our organizations are to remain competitive and if we, as employees, are going to remain employable. Ann Alder’s blog post suggests ten thoughtful ways in which organization’s can encourage and nuture this form of development. Ann Alder is author of Pattern Making, Pattern Breaking: Using Past Experience and New Behaviour in Training, Education and Change Management.
Jeff Gold’s inaugural lecture is well worth watching. The conundrum he refers to in the title is ‘a position where a nominated leader is expected to be a leader while power and influence are significantly distributed throughout and between organisations.’ These ideas of distributed leadership are becoming increasingly accepted as the new reality of many organizations. Jeff offers hope and help to those people expected to lead and floundering around to work out exactly what that means. He argues that leaders need to become ‘hands-on’ and ‘heads-in’, which is essentially, if I have understood his piece, active facilitators of learning and change. Jeff Gold is co-editor of The Gower Handbook of Leadership and Management Development
I like to make sure we balance stories about success and failure in the blog, so that it doesn’t simply become a digital Cassandra. But there are very useful articles out there on the causes of project failure and Howard Hills research report 33 Reasons Why e-Learning Project Fail is a case in point. I recommend it to trainers and e-learning developers alike. Although it’s ostensibly about project failure there is a raft of pragmatic (and rigorous) advice to ensure project success, so it’s not all doom and gloom. Howard Hills is author of Team-Based Learning and Individual Preferences in e-Learning
Sadly, in a number of companies, there is still something of a gap between the rhetoric around developing employees and the reality. Stuart Emmett’s refreshing article on the subject, ‘Learning in Companies’, offers you a mirror to hold up to your own organization’s performance in this area. Stuart Emmett is co-author of The Relationship-Driven Supply Chain.
One of the great aspects of the Internet are all the tools that you can access, often free of charge, that can provide a super starting point for more detailed reading or research. Have a look at ‘Questions to Assess the Psychological Contract’ on the Clutterbuck Associates website. For anyone struggling to articulate what they want from their work (or for employers struggling to understand their relationship with their employees), this offers a useful icebreaker to the process. David Clutterbuck is editor of The Situational Mentor and co-author of the forthcoming Working Without Goals.
