Innovation Consulting

There is an abundance of information about innovation.

Reading about innovation can make the process of increasing an organisation’s innovation capability sound easy.

However, achieving and sustaining effective levels of innovation is not as simple as it appears and it can take time.

I can offer not only a workable set of principles and a strategy for your organisation but also a range of practical ideas and support for their implementation. Many focus on the key areas of an organisation that I describe here as the innovation enablers. 

The first area of attention needs to be the leadership of an organization.

The following list of factors are instrumental in an organisation’s ability to be innovative, to have an innovative culture. These factors are described in full in Bessant’s (2003) excellent book, High Involvement Innovation. The factors (in bold here) come from Bessant (2003, p. 35-36) but the explanations are mine:

• Motivation – in the end it is individuals who innovate – and those who are highly motivated, who feel that they have something to offer the organisation and who want to play an active role in its success – these are the individuals who can create and develop and implement innovative ideas. It is crucial to reward and recognise innovative efforts;
• Availability of ‘slack’ resources – any kind of innovation and in fact the thinking of ideas that begins the innovative process- takes resources of some kind and to some degree. Time is one such resource- individuals need to have the cognitive and emotional capacity and energy to think creatively, and the organisation needs to also allow other resources to be available for innovation to occur- whether those resources be physical, technological, financial, human and so on;
• Leadership- I’d put this at the top of the list but am sticking to how Bessant has listed them. When it comes to whether or not and in what way/s an organisation thinks about and approaches the innovation area, leaders can deliberately manage for innovation, or unintentionally inhibit it, or somewhere in between. Leaders control resources and also shape and influence the culture; they may engender in employees an enthusiasm or commitment to looking to ways to be innovative, and conversely they may unwittingly squash the spirit and commitment to look at things in a creative way, or they may manage in such as way that the organisation is always in operational mode, without giving time and space to think strategically about the new, different, improved; leadership is key to innovation;
• Direction-is the organisation looking at how to do ‘better’, ‘different’, ‘improved’? Is it strategic?
• Self-development- knowledge, skills, new perspectives, learning to learn – an innovative enterprise is a learning enterprise and this is a key area of my focus.

My work also focuses heavily in the following areas, cited by Bessant as crucial to increasing and improving an organisation’s capacity for a sustained approach to innovation:

• Enabling tools and resources;
• Communication;
• Knowledge management;
• Cross-boundary working;
• Appropriate structures;
• Team working;
• Learning.