Creating the Innovation Culture

Geniuses, Champions and Leaders
by Langdon Morris

As the business world becomes increasingly complex and still more astonishingly competitive, companies are turning to innovation as one of the few durable sources of competitive advantage. Innovation is now among the top priorities for the majority of the world’s large companies.

The necessity of innovation is now universally accepted, but beyond their enthusiasm for bright ideas, most leaders know that to be successful over the long term they have to develop a strong innovation culture.

Such a culture can be recognized as an organization that is known externally in the marketplace as a genuine innovator, and equally that it is known internally among the people in the organization as a dynamic, innovation-friendly place to be.

Organizations that have attained this culture produce innovations of all types - breakthroughs, useful incremental changes, and even radically new ways of doing business, and they do so with regularity.

And actually, the concept of regularity is a good test to see if a company really has an innovation culture. How frequently interesting new ideas, concepts, products, or services are produced? If new stuff seems to be coming out all the time, in different ways, and if the internal discussion in the organization is focused largely on innovation, then it’s likely that an innovation culture exists there.

But supposing an innovation culture doesn’t yet exist in your organization. Then how can you make it happen? How do organizations develop an innovation culture? Who should be involved in the innovation process? What roles should they play?

Answering these questions is the purpose of this white paper.

Contents

1. Culture and Innovation Culture
2. Innovation's Creative Geniuses
3. The Innovation Cycle
4. Innovation Champions
5. Innovation and Failure
6. Innovation Leaders
7. The Organizational Paradox