Great list of innovation management tools

Blogging Innovation blog has a great list of tools to manage innovation and ideas. Tools to manage ideation are important and the author has put in quite a bit of work to generate a pretty comprehensive list. Please also check out his word document on desired functionality.

In my experience, idea management tools are a subset of processes, tools and metrics needed to ensure that innovation pays off. Managers need to find ways to quickly evaluate, develop and monitor innovative ideas. There also needs to be an efficient approach to kill innovation projects that do not pan out.

One of the companies I worked at had a great innovation generation machine. They gave out $20-50k for small projects that looked outlandish enough. However, there existed no way to catch all this innovation and develop it further into delivered products.

What is your experience? How is innovation management working in your organization.

CEOs really want more creativity?

Here is an interesting article in Business Week penned by a Senior Vice President from IBM. The article claims that CEO priorities are changing fundamentally:

There is compelling new evidence that CEOs’ priorities in this area are changing in important ways. According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value (IBM), CEOs identify “creativity” as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.

There are a couple of key take aways in the article.

CEOs have started valuing creativity and continuous innovation.
CEOs want to be disruptive: “Disrupt status quo, disrupt business models and disrupt organizational paralysis.”

Clearly, all these things are very important to do – in any company, in any economy. What the article does not explain is why the CEOs did not value creativity earlier! Did they really believe that it was better to be unoriginal? Did they actually want organizational paralysis?

The take aways are also very difficult to realize. For one to disrupt status quo, one needs to understand what needs to be disrupted and what the desired end state should be. To do that, an organization needs a good evaluation of its processes or a way to get that evaluation in the first place. If you have that capability, then you probably do not have organizational paralysis to start with. Driving innovation has always been a big challenge.

What do you think? What are some examples of organizational paralysis that you have seen? Are then any stories or challenges that you would like to share?