FROM DILIP MUKERJEA

"Genius is in-born, may it never be still-born."

"Oysters, irritated by grains of sand, give birth to pearls. Brains, irritated by curiosity, give birth to ideas."

"Brainpower is the bridge to the future; it is what transports you from wishful thinking to willful doing."

"Unless you keep learning & growing, the status quo has no status."

Friday, March 2, 2012

Braindancing Bytes: 'INSIGHTS ON INNOVATION FOR THE CREATIVE EDUCATOR', Part II, by Dilip Mukerjea

[continued from Part I in the Last Post:]

Part II: IINSIGHTS ON INNOVATION

What do you believe is impossible to achieve, yet, if it could be done, would fundamentally transform your business?

What are you NOT doing that you should be doing, if you knew your prospects were to evaporate in less than a year from now?

We have emerged from an Age of Atomic Chaos into one that contains Genetic Possibilities.

Prominent domains in which opportunities and profits exist, lie embedded in the ICE AGE (an acronym for items represented below):

(1) Information

(2) Communication

(3) Entertainment

(4) Attractiveness (including healthcare and wellness)

(5) Genomics

(6) Education (relevant to The Learning Economy).

Are you actively knowledge-ing, or has knowledge rot set in? Without continual learning, and knowledge mapping, we stay behind...operating on obsolete expertise.

Knowledge can be used in two ways as a resource in a product:

(1) When we make the product smarter, we get continuous improvement.

(2) When we make a smarter product, it can lead to BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATION!

Do you have an Innovation Dashboard to track the real-time status quo of your innovation efforts? Or is your innovation culture rooted in intellectual feudalism?

Is every member of your organisation actively involved in business innovation? Or are they merely following rules and filling roles that offer no competitive advantage?

Billions of people walk in to work every day...how many of them are sleepwalking? How many of them have become passive players in a game of obsolete paradigms? We live in exponential times.

Winners in the innovation arena don’t follow best practices; they lead with different, revolutionary initiatives! They are aware that strategy life cycles are shrinking, and thus have incorporated innovation into their consciousnesses. They extract wealth from minds, not mines!

Beauty lies in the brain of the beholder !

Today, “business as usual” means “business as unusual.” Real time has become ‘unreal time’. Are you operating on the leading edge or on the bleeding edge? What is your COST of CONFUSION and the VALUE of CLARITY?

Clarity is not certainty. Clarity comes from a level of awareness that allows us to manage ourselves; certainty often comes from blind belief. You can have certainty from clarity, but not always clarity from certainty, which often means buying into the illusion of guarantees and controls offered by management administrivia.

A lack of clarity leads to an abundance of confusion! Is this affordable?

The word innovation first appeared, according to Webster’s online dictionary, in the 15th c. It was derived from the Latin word novus, or ‘new’. In modern business terms, newness can refer to anything that affects customers, manufacturing, sales, or service. The content of “newness” can, of course, vary from incremental improvement to wholesale transformation. Innovation can encompass:

✑ a new product enabling a pioneering approach to surgery, as Johnson and Johnson accomplished in the ‘80s with “keyhole” surgery, or laparoscopy.

✑ a new process for making steel, as Nucor launched in the 1970s

✑ a new service for the customers, as MCI created with their Friends and Family service.

✑ a new way of doing business, as Enron came up with when they created the natural gas trading market.

Innovation can be incremental, substantial, or transformational. While innovation is based on creativity and invention, it is much broader. An invention implies the “conversion of a creative idea to some communicable and verifiable form, generally to fulfill some need or perform a task.”

Innovation is invention that has generated economic value. No economic value, no innovation.

Invention precedes innovation. It does not presume economic worth. Innovation implies an expectation of wealth creation. Not every invention is an innovation, because not every invention can be commercially exploited.

[to be continued in Part III in the Next Post:]
© Dilip Mukerjea

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