How can you break out of the group-think that affects most large organizations? How can you escape from the corporate frameworks that shape discussions and ideas? Philips is moving from a high-volume electronics manufacturere to a design-led, lifestyle technology company. It needs help to get there so it set up a 'simplicity board'. Philips reckoned it needed a fresh perspective from creative types with no ties to the company. So it formed the simplicity board, a group of external specialists in health care, fashion, design, and architecture. "Philips was too inward-looking," says Andrea Ragnetti, Chief Marketing Offier. "To really embed simplicity into the company's DNA, we needed an element of vision."

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The story behind our featured video of the month is the perfect example of generational change. A perfect case study in what happens when organisations fail to recognise the changing nature of the market and fail to adapt their business models to suot the market. It is OKGo that has shown creative leadership here, not EMI. It is worth reading their blog to see how well they handled this.

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Business leaders must manage and support creativity just as they would any other asset. Harvard Business School professors Teresa Amabile, Mary Tripsas, and Mukti Khaire discuss where creativity comes from, how entrepreneurs use it, and why innovation is often a team sport. 

Key concepts include:

• People have their best days and do their best work when they are allowed to make progress.
• Whenever a firm introduces a truly novel product, suppliers, complementary producers, distribution channels, and consumers must often develop new capabilities, beliefs, and behaviors for the product to succeed, creating a challenge for the innovator.
• The perception exists that creative businesses can just start up, when in fact it takes a while for an entire ecosystem to actually generate an industry.

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Einstein, Ford, Picasso and Edison rarely said the word innovation and neither should you. Every Fortune 500 crowd I've said this to laughs and agrees. The abuse of words like innovation, disruption, game changing and breakthrough is killing us. We're tripping over our own egos, lost in the ignorance of romance for the vagaries of pseudo-thinking associated with these words. The more often people in a company use this word, the less likely anything worthy of that label is actually happening, as it's often the confused and the desperate who believe simply saying a word again and again like a magic spell causes anything at all to happen.

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I read with interest Business Week entitled why CEO's don't get innovation by Stefan Lindegaard another innovation speaker, network facilitator, and adviser on open innovation and intrapreneurship. He runs all the usual arguments about the inability of organisations to innovate, the spurious argument that leaders now emerging with MBAs are the first with innovation subjects in their degrees (that stat certainly doesn't stack up with our research which is telling us globally universities are failing badly with MBAs, most of whom don't have innovation in their programmes anyway) and summarises with this meaningless statement

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