Organisations are constantly bombarded by messages about the need to be more 'innovative', to increase the rate of 'innovation' and to create a climate that supports 'an innovative culture'. Given this stream of messages you would be mistaken for thinking that there was a definitive statement of what innovation was and how it applies to your business.

Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach wants to know whether you have been asked and tasked to innovate within your company or organization? And the follow-up question is are you having difficulty getting started and achieving results? I suspect that many readers of this article have experienced or witnessed that one of the biggest issues with innovation is that they really are not sure just where to start. So, with that in mind, Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach offers the following list of twenty (20) tips to inspire and initiate innovation for you and your business.

When companies set out to innovate strategically, they often rush off in the same direction as everyone else. In many industries - especially high-tech industries - this causes markets to mature very quickly as unique specialty items that took tremendous R&D investment become "me-too" commodities. If the innovation is a compelling one that creates real, preferred value for the customer, this commoditization is almost inevitable. The only place this is unlikely to occur is when your competitors - for whatever reason - do not copy your valuable idea.

At the core of organizational innovation is the need to improve or change a product, process or service. All innovation revolves around change - but not all change is innovative. Organizational innovation encourages individuals to think independently and creatively in applying personal knowledge to organizational challenges. Therefore, organizational innovation requires a culture of innovation that supports new ideas, processes and generally new ways of "doing business".

Innovation has become a buzzword that is so overused and at the same time so misunderstood. The first challenge in any organization looking to establish innovation is to clarify what innovation is, and what it implies for the organization in terms of taking action. There are many definitions of Innovation in the literature but not many are concise and effective. In their wonderful book, Innovation Training, Ruth Ann Hattori and Joyce Wycoff define Innovation as "People implementing new ideas that create value".

A fundamental premise of Open Innovation is that good ideas can come from anywhere, even when a company operates in a very specialized core business. Moreover, innovations that come from outside of one's core business, such as in packaging or transportation, are better left to those who specialize in those areas. Perhaps more controversial is the assertion that by relying only on the ideas generated from within, an organization's core business innovations can become self-limiting because the pool of knowledge and idea generation may become somewhat myopic.

The biggest issue with implementation is that you cannot simply copy another company. Too often a CEO mandates an open innovation initiative because it works for another company and thinks it can simply be duplicated. It just doesn't work that way. Another issue comes as a result of the lack of company-wide engagement. A go-getter director initiates a program for a department, typically R&D, and the rest of the company is indifferent or even resistant to the changes.

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