Innovation and Licensing

I was recently reading a blog post by Jeffrey Phillips regarding the need to give people a license to innovate. His thesis was this idea that organizations don't do enough to educate, train, and give permission to innovate. He makes the argument that training people to be more innovative should cover a few dimensions:

• how does it align with the corporate strategy
• what processes do you follow for sustainable innovation
• how do you work within the existing culture to change the culture and become more innovative.

I remember facilitating a training on creative leadership where the discussion focused on creativity in the workplace. Someone in the audience commented that everyone is creative and then gave examples. But as we broke down those specific areas, it became clear that they were great at solving smaller problems, but they weren't innovative. It's much tougher to be innovative...to take risks and try new things.

Michael T. Bauer
http://www.creativeleading.com