Entries Tagged 'innovation' ↓

Couple of years ago I was watching a video on YouTube showing footage shot from an attack helicopter. The voiceover explained how the rocket was fired at the same time the target was framed, and the on board computer guided the round to the target.

About the same time I saw a small news item in the Industry Monitor column by Otis Port from a couple of years ago, titled “A Drill That Can Think As It Makes A Hole.” Continue reading →

“Innovation” is one of those terms like “quality” that has long ago lost its ability to communicate much of anything useful.

The companies that have very little innovation tend to throw the word around indiscriminately in an effort to convince through weary repetition. Problem is the word slides through the brain without leaving a trace. 

APPLE is clearly one of the world’s masters of innovation. I went to their investor site and read through a number of their filings and publications and had to go several pages deep before I discovered the word “innovation. On the other hand, going through the same kinds of materials of a well known stumbling, shuffling  automobile dinosaur, “innovation,” “innovating,” “innovative” and “innovators” variously modified by “leading,” “world-class,” “breakthrough,” and “visionary” were sprinkled all through the first couple of pages like too much pepper on a potato.

I’ve found a terrific example of what happens when a well known global company decides to change from the ground up to be an “innovation” company, driven by creative permissiveness fueled by an army of creative thinking coaches in hundreds of retreats, offsites and brainstorming calisthenics.  I’ll tell this enlightening tale in a soon-to-come post. 

Companies that are really innovative don’t think of themselves as innovative, mainly because creativity and the thrill of putting it to practical use and seeing it work is a part of the way they work and the way they think.  It doesn’t need a word.  Again and again in APPLE’s material you see thoughts like “We try to be the best company at sensing what people want and creating and designing it better than anyone else.”

They don’t think of themselves as innovative because that way of thinking and behaving is not what they do, rather it is who they are.

Innovation has to be part of a company’s DNA to be a dependable component of culture, and almost without exception efforts to inject it into the system by training and management directives are doomed to be both short lived and disruptive.

APPLE is innovative because it is innovative.

The fumbling giant car company is not innovative because it is not innovative, and  its relentless insistence that it is carries about the same persuasive impact as “our people make the difference.”

All this is not to say that companies that aren’t inherently innovative can’t innovate. All we’re saying is that it’s fiendishly difficult to get that way from the inside out. The right outside resource is a much better solution, particularly when things need to happen fast.

-Howard