The innovative organisation: how to make innovation happen

17 November, 2014 / Articles

The innovative organisation. This is not the first time I have written about innovation. However, there are still so many misunderstandings about the term that I feel the urge to explain it one more time.

As I mentioned previously, innovation and creativity are two different things, although there are some overlapping aspects. Creativity is about (regularly) developing new ideas or concepts, whereas innovation also involves generating new ideas but those ideas must be “commercialisable”. In other words, having lots of ideas only means that you are being creative — unless you can develop those ideas and sell them to the market, thus improving the bottom line of your organisation.

For example, Apple is famed for being an innovative company. Before it releases any product, thousands of ideas circulate among the research and development team. However, not every idea can be turned into a product. Only the most distinctive and outstanding ideas make the cut. That’s why we have the smartphone — a highly innovative product that originated when someone at Apple started wondering why mobile phones could only be used for making calls but nothing else.

However, it must be noted that being innovative has many levels: from individual innovation to process improvement to continuous innovation and disruptive innovation.

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