The Many Faces of Innovation

There is a need to recognize the many faces of innovation including:

• technological and social innovations
• incremental and breakthrough innovations
• innovations in strategy, structure, support systems, skills and shared values
• innovation at the individual, organizational or inter-organizational level
• innovations in products and services
• process innovations (changing the way work is undertaken)
• innovations in culture (changing the organizational structure and the operating principles including changing attitudes and behaviours)

Whatever type of innovation we consider, it is:

• an executed idea – something that’s gone from drawing board to implementation
• an idea which has sustainable value – it lasts for more than a day or so as measured by performance improvements over time
• something that makes a difference that people are willing to pay for, either directly (through price) or indirectly (by demanding the service).
• innovation can involve completely new developments – as in a “breakthrough” which changes the way we do things – such as the development of the Internet which has changed the nature of commerce, created new opportunities for learning systems and spawned new kinds of organizations – or it can be an improvement on existing practices or technologies such as different ways of controlling exhaust emissions from a car or of extracting crude oil from the oil sands.

We need to focus on recognizing that innovation is more than research – more than just a good idea. It is a good idea that has been made to work.

• Innovation involves a complex process that leads to a product or service that either meets a demand or creates one. Meeting or creating demand requires a supply chain that involves commercial practices and effective management.
• The critical starting point for a commercial innovation is primarily a firm. Building a culture of innovation in any country thus requires a greater understanding of and respect for commerce among the populace.
• We need to avoid pitting the universities against the firms in refining innovation policies. We need to become more informed about and responsive to the appropriate balance of investments in these different sectors. (See the latest research on this balance of investments by Alan Cornford.)
• The new recognition of the important role of agile learning and collaboration in innovation and the sense that innovation systems are basically social systems has opened the door for testing the driving idea that suggest, “While innovation has many faces – its essence is best represented by the concept of a culture of innovation in which imaginative but disciplined experimentation is a key value.”