Anyone Can Innovate

Source: CPA Success

The following includes excerpts from an April 8, 2010, blog post entitled "Innovation is everyone's business."

Think of innovation and you're likely to conjure up images of corporate rock stars, must-have gadgets or soon-to-be-cliché thought-leadership tracts. Rock the boat with something new and exciting -- that's innovation, right?

Wrong.

Real innovation, says futurist Andrew Zolli, is less about producing something new and more about anticipating what's going to be new -- and we all can do that. "Innovation," he says, is "the creation of new forms of value in anticipation of future demand." And "great leaders?" They're the ones who systematically scan the horizon for "weak signals" of disruptive forces. Detecting those signals early and acting on them is key.

"Our normal metaphors about innovation are all about breakthroughs, change, things that are different, a radical reframing of an industry," Zolli says. "The reality is that most innovative work is incremental improvement. It's about staying ahead of trends as opposed to reacting to trends.

"The challenge," he says, "is that once you fall behind those trends, a bunker mentality can set in. At that point, you encounter an issue that I call 'cognitive similarity' -- people thinking the same way and making that bunker mentality worse.

"We need to begin to adapt to a world in which we engage the very top of the organization in a conversation about embracing a different kind of risk portfolio. That means having an established set of processes in place in which you have no expectation of return. You understand that you make investments not just for operational excellence, but for learning and adaptation. Those things are inherently uncertain, but if you begin to do them at a small or medium scale, they can yield tremendous benefits. The cultural changes they engender are really significant."

To read the entire post, click here.

From CPA Success, the blog of the Maryland Association of CPAs, www.cpasuccess.com, April 8, 2010.