MIT Sloan Management Review

Everyone wants an innovative corporate culture, but how do you develop one? This article posits that the ability of a culture to support innovation depends on six key building blocks: values, behaviors, climate, resources, processes and success. The article also includes a 54-element test developed to enable managers to assess a company’s “Innovation Quotient.” A case study in the article outlines the experience of a Latin American company with the assessment tool.

How can companies ensure that a promising initiative receives the necessary resources? And why do so many brilliant inventions fail while other seemingly mediocre offerings succeed? Such questions are addressed in two recent books — Unrelenting Innovation: How to Build a Culture for Market Dominance by Gerard J. Tellis and The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation by Ron Adner. The first book concentrates on a company’s internal workings, while the latter focuses on its external environment.

While change and innovation clearly produce much of the turbulence that besets modern businesses, research suggests that change itself is not the culprit, but rather how organizations perceive and cope with change. Both people and organizations rely on analogies to help them comprehend change, including the meaning and potential of new technologies, systems and processes. But do all analogies function in the same way? How strongly should organizations adhere to their chosen analogies?

Anyone trying to figure out which kinds of innovation are most worth paying attention to has to come up with ways to, as Wired magazine puts it, “size up ideas and separate the truly world-changing from the merely interesting.” Here are seven things to look for.

Too many executives confuse what an innovation is with what an innovation would do for them if they had one. The solution? Think of innovation as an if-then argument.

“As a company,” says Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, “one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you’re going to invent, you’re going to disrupt. A lot of entrenched interests are not going to like it.”

Generating good innovation proposals from within the ranks of the organization is only the beginning. The more difficult part is creating a selection process that identifies which ideas to implement.

In the new winter issue of MIT SMR, editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins’ “Steve Jobs, the Way John Sculley Tells It” highlights a recent interview with the one-time Apple CEO about the current chief executive, who announced Monday that he’s taking a medical leave of absence.

“Adjacent Possible” and other ways of thinking about collaboration
Here’s how an October 2010 interview in Wired begins: “Say the word ‘inventor’ and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement.

Energy sector innovation faces an important hurdle, according to MIT’s Ernest Moniz. How do we reconcile the cultural mismatch between innovators and the establishment?

When companies collaborate, low trust is detrimental to innovation. But so is very high trust. The optimal level, yielding maximum impact, lies in between.

Courtesy of BMW.

Continuous innovation is the engine that drives highly successful companies such as Apple, General Electric, Google, Honda, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Tata group and many others.

How your IP strategy might be killing your open innovation activities — and what you can do to make it an enabler, even a builder of industrial ‘ecosystems,’ instead.

Many organizations commit large amounts of resources to maintain their competitiveness through innovative activities.

If one innovation approach is helpful, you might think using more than one approach to innovation would be even more productive. Not necessarily, write Frank T. Rothaermel and Andrew M. Hess in the new issue of Business Insight, MIT Sloan Management Review’s collaboration with The Wall Street Journal.

In an informative new book, two Wharton professors look at innovation from a process management perspective.

Erik Simanis and Stuart Hart offer an interesting perspective on innovation in an article in the the new Summer 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.  In particular, they offer a vision of a world in which businesses and communities are more closely intertwined.

Nurturing a new and lasting idea doesn’t result from analyzing market data. Aspiring creators must act on what nonprofits already know: you get the best answers by burying yourself in the questions.

Should external innovators be organized in collaborative communities or competitive markets? The answer depends on three crucial issues.

In the popular imagination, innovation is often associated with creative inspiration that can neither be predicted nor planned.