HOW BAD DO YOU WANT TO? INNOVATION AND THE POWER OF PUSH-BACK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UokTE-njLRA

Innovation is THE buzzword par excellence, for the 21stC. But how bad do businesses and organisations want to 'do' innovation. At the University of Melbourne, my undergrad philosophy handbook distinguished between the academic value of having a personal philosophy and doing philosophy.

The same, I submit, holds for innovation. Innovation is not primarily a marketing excercise or a "brand promise", though those are certainly valid constituents. Innovation is delivering on that promise, adding real value through original thinking, production or design. (An imprecise definition, but a working one nonetheless).

Which necessitates the power of push-back. In short, the inner compulsion for an organisation to empower those who deal, mediately or intermediately, with a group of people to disrupt - and possibly destroy - existing practice for an intangible, prospective goal. As with blue-ocean thinking, innovation contains the potential for people to realise something radically better, or radically new. 

And that means getting on some peoples' nerves: straining their budgets, perhaps, calling on additional, numerically unwarranted resources, tearing down existing thinking or functional specialities or siloes and questioning expert and tried-and-true thinking. Innovation involves enormous push-back.

Is your organisation ready for that discontinuous leap? Or does "innovation" stand outside your organisation's wider chain of causation, a pretty promise??????