Some Useful Definitions for Organizational Prosperity through Breakthrough Innovation:

Creativity: An individual's ability to produce different and valuable results.

Innovation: An organization's capacity to leverage the creativity of its employees.

Research on leadership, strategy, and creativity:

	Recent research to address the challenges facing leaders eager to build more prosperous and sustainable organizations has led to some interesting results, including the identification of several key drivers of innovation. These include: A versatile leadership style that is both enabling and forceful, strategic and tactical; Flexible processes that promote communication, creative decision making, creativity and innovation, as well as provide a focus on execution; Metrics that drive accountability and progress. A culture that promotes innovation along the critical dimensions of vision, mission and strategy; values and systems; customer orientation; and empowerment.
	The research also led to the conclusion that the practices promoting innovation in a company are the enduring principles of good management. These principles drive innovation, but they have also been shown to promote high employee satisfaction, morale and thus well satisfied, loyal customers and long-term organizational success. The research also identified three reasons for the tough challenges leaders face in building an organization for top performance, one where innovation, high morale and customer satisfaction thrive: The first is that there is almost too much separate focus on innovation. To be truly successful, an organization needs to embed innovative practices and metrics into the fabric of the organization and align them with the organization's culture. The second is that an organization's ability to respond quickly to customers and to come up with new ways of doing business depends to a great extent on the leadership style at the top. When senior leaders of an organization — no matter how large or small — are open to being challenged, remain curious and willing to experiment, and truly value and listen to others, then their employees will ask questions and come up with new ideas and solutions. This type of leadership style, however, is not easy for leaders to adopt, especially if they have to fight, in one academic's words, "the very human tendency to cling to [different] formulas that worked well in the past." The third is that prescriptions for what actions to take to build a more innovative organization are often made with the assumption that all leaders are the same. These recommendations rarely recognize the role of different personality preferences even though those preferences, like functional backgrounds and other demographics, have a significant impact on the strategic choices of leaders and their teams.
	For specific steps to take to improve organizational performance and an "Organizational Innovation Diagnostic" to assess your organization's readiness for more innovation and sustained prosperity, just email me.
	Future articles at this site will explore these issues and challenges in more detail. If you are interested in being notified about future articles, please join the mailing list.
	These issues and a more in-depth examination of the link between innovation and culture and the role of leadership style were the topics of the 2007 and 2008 Innovation Summits held in Cologne, Germany. The Third Innovation Summit will explore the challenges of measuring innovation. If you would like more information about the Third Innovation Summit to be held in Germany on October 8, 2009, and its US counterpart scheduled for November 19, 2009, in New York City, you can email me or you can join the mailing list to receive an invitation to the Summit.