Speed of Innovation

Business is internally driven to create demand, a continual stream of ideas leading to new products must be flowing. In other words, innovation begins with ideas. To generate a stream of ideas, a corporation must utilize all its intellectual resources (i.e., its entire workforce). When a corporation is engaging in customer-driven innovation on demand, speed of innovation counts.

The knowledge age innovation process is the place where many minds collaborate to create an effective solution on demand. Many minds in a corporation must be involved to generate new ideas for innovative products and solutions. Excellence in idea management will become a corporate imperative in order to grow profitably.

Involving all employees requires the understanding how to utilize their intellectual potential in creating the new intellectual property. The process must be standardized to a great extent, with some exceptions. Therefore, the innovation process must be well understood. One cannot accelerate innovation as an art; it must become science in order to accelerate. The paradigm of innovation must be that it is a science as much as it is an art. In order to innovate with a higher probability of success, corporations must look into various elements of the innovation process and practice them just like any other existing standard process.

Studies show that innovation is built on the past. In other words, all innovative solutions are based on past knowledge, continual experimentation, and extension of this past knowledge and experimentation. The process of innovation appears to be evolutionary in nature as well. People must understand this evolutionary nature of the innovation process, open new doors to new insights in the world around them (or even the universe), and search for new solutions. Past inventions indicated that innovations are merely discoveries. Therefore, people must continually strive to discover new aspects of business and the world. Once people accept that innovation is a result of the discovery process, not a subconscious effort, the process of innovation can be easily understood and established as a predictable system.