by BSL professor Bryan Parker

In a world where change is relentless and accelerating, the biggest challenge facing managers today is how to build an organization that is able to build resilience or, like life on earth, able to generate new varieties that can survive and thrive in a new, ever more hostile environment.

Ask yourself how many of your or your company’s initiatives are radically innovative in the sense that they have the power to either:

• Change customer expectations/experiences in a profound way;
• Change the economics of your industry;
• Change the basis of competitive advantage.

The answer lies in undertaking new initiatives that are contrary to what everybody else is doing and which reinvent “the rules of the game.” And the key to this is individual creativity and the organization’s ability to innovate relentlessly.

Here (right column) are10 tips for injecting creativity into your business endeavors.

Professor Note

Professor Bryan Parker teaches the MBA course Innovation & Creativty in Business. The course is offered as a 3 day seminar for working professionals. Next course July 1-3, 2010.

Related Info/Links

• Innovation & Creativity Seminar Description
• Marketing Essentials Seminar (now registering)
• All Seminars

10 Tips for Building Innovation & Creativity

1. Personal Observations/Curiosity: Get out of your office to see what is going on in your business...in the market place, on the factory floor, at your customer service points. Talk to employees, to customers, former customers, non-customers. These valuable insights can be a source of inspiration and passion to pursue new ideas. Seeing is believing.

2. Thinking time: Allocate a few hours every week to thinking about what you would like your business to look like in the future and how you might get there. Visualise that future success and see how it feels. This is how dreams become reality.

3. Bold Challenges: Define the challenge at the highest, indeed the most controversial, level and commit yourself to resolving it. The passion for solving extraordinary problems creates the potential for extraordinary accomplishments.

4. Networking: Search the world for answers to your challenge. Somewhere there will exist a solution. It might come from actual or potential customers, employees, partners in your business, other companies, universities, think-tanks or laboratories. You can’t possibly “know it all.”

5. Alliance-building: Build a team of “angels” who support your idea to help you move it forward. Use them to silence the “devils” who may resist your initiative.

6. Rule-breaking: Be hugely discontent with the status quo. Be prepared to break rules that paralyse innovation. Fight the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” syndrome; fix it before it goes broke! Rules are made to be broken.

7. Experimentation: Develop lots of new business ideas, prioritize and test them. Eliminate the losers and devote people and money to the winners. Learn and adapt your plan as you go. The winners will more than pay for the losers.

8. Training/HR: Make innovation everyone’s job every day. Give your people training in how to develop and handle new ideas. Reward good ideas and praise near-misses which can be a source of new learning. People are your most valuable innovation resource.

9. Whole-brains: Balance your innovation team between the creative types and the administrators. The creatives (right-brainers) develop the ideas, the administrators (left-brainers) look after the implementation. A hot idea needs a cold brain to carry it forward.

10. Work/life balance: Work at achieving a healthy balance between work and pleasure. Ideas can spring up any time any-where.