Innovation is Culture, not R&D
One of the myths out there in the business world is that high levels of research and development funding will produce innovative products. It turns out, this isn’t accurate.
My friend Liz, over at Successful Blog, picked up a great study done by Booz Allen Harrison (my “old skool” self wonders who Harrison is since in my time it was always Booz Allen…) on innovation and looked at the subject from a lot of different angles.
The angle that interested me was the two things that “sustainable innovation” depends upon:
Tools and processes to move from idea through commercialization
Linking research and development with customers.
I’ve written a lot about brainstorming here on Pimp Your Work. Tris has written a lot about tools that aid in capturing the brainstorming and ideas that people in companies create.
Once this capturing of ideas has finished, implementation takes a key role in making innovation happen. Not a lot has been written about implementing the ideas, but implementation is the critical key to making innovation translate into revenue and profit for companies and value for customers. It turns out culture has a lot more to do with innovation than research and development.
How many of the ideas captured in your work area become a reality?
