By: John Schmidt

John Schmidt — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 14:26:15 +0000

The topic on innovating with less money suggests a tight dependency between these two ideas. I disagree. There are many examples of innovation occuring in environments that were cash-strapped – in the fact difficult financial times can spawn new ideas out of necessity.
A couple of more important factors in driving innovation is to create an information-rich environment and a culture that celebrates failure. If you want people to innovate, you have to provide them with the context in which to innovate by giving them information. All kinds of information like budgets, investment plans, staffing plans, competitive insights, etc. Some organizations have cultures where this information is closely guarded by the department that creates it – this is a great way to prevent innovation – it basically tells people to “don’t think – shut up and do your job”.
The second cultural driver for innovation is one where failure is celebrated. I don’t mean have a party when something goes wrong, instead, celebrate by having a post-mortem of the failed project, capture the lessons learned, codify them, and disseminate them to the broadest possible audience. If you want to innovate you have to experiment. Some experiments will fail – but if you learn from them, then you could view 100% of the experiments as successful.
John

By: Steve Craggs

Steve Craggs — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 10:54:37 +0000

I have to comment on the last point, about looking to Web 2.0. Am I the only person that thinks Web 2.0 is really flaky? I suppose I have relatively little to do with it, but I know that things like trackbacks and blog content consolidators seem pretty hit and miss to me.
Steve

Comments on: The CIO challenge in 2007: Innovate but spend less money – suggestions welcome!

By: John Schmidt

By: Steve Craggs