Chairman's Message

The Impotency of Organizational Innovation

2012-01-24T10:59:36Z

Dig into the rigorous thinking via Google Scholar on innovation and you will find there are 2, 300,000 articles and books of an academic nature that have verified and validated every different type of known innovation process - disruptive, open source, front end, back end, induced, user, IT, supply chain, management, R&D and even innovative innovation!! Enough information to drive you crazy. And worse still, there is a huge problem with most of it!! It perceives innovation as a theory and a process and it is neither. It’s a practice‼ Innovation as theory is like

The Hard Currency in Uncertain Economic Times - Ideas!

2011-12-15T09:22:02Z

It’s all very well to talk about innovation in times like this. However innovation is intangible and intangibility is not what we need right now. Organizations need evidence, hard numbers that enable them to really understand how they are operating functionally on a daily basis. Yet it is the focus on the ideas that flow around that functionality that create the seeds of innovation. Without that exchange of ideas, organizational stagnation and pessimism set in, morale collapses and passion dies. Thus, the hard currency in these unstable economic times is ideas‼ Innovation is invariable viewed as

Understanding The Discipline of Innovation

2011-11-30T03:21:03Z

Last week I had the opportunity to run a workshop “An Understanding of Innovation, Its Application and Implementation” in Jakarta, Indonesia for 10 CIOs from some of the world’s largest multi-national companies – industries represented included airline, auto-manufacturing, consumer products, petroleum, pharmaceutical, transport and logistics. Four interesting findings about innovation to emerge from the workshop.

Managing Creativity from An Organizational Economics Perspective

2011-06-28T05:20:16Z

This white paper supports the theory and practice behind the Management Innovation Index by exploring the organizational dilemma of intangibility in innovation and the consequences of ignoring it; proposing a case for a systems thinking approach to organizational creativity to drive measurable innovation; reviewing the importance of the emergence of the new field of organizational economics as a way of analyzing organizations and offers a method for measuring and managing the impact of creativity on the key measures for success of an organization or business in 21st Century.

Click here to download the paper in full

Malaysia and Innovation: Why Malaysia Will Become the Innovation Powerhouse of South East Asia

2010-12-15T10:18:08Z

The First Kuala Lumpur Innovation Forum designed and delivered by the Malaysian Foundation for Innovation was an excellent example of collaboration in a secular Islamic state where the common good of the country and its people and their spiritual health is considered tantamout rather than any drive for individual riches and freedoms at any cost. Education, knowledge, understanding, experience and initiative dominated the topics of conversation not the rights and wrongs of a particular political ideology or philosophy. In their new book Leading Innovasian launched at the event, the co-authors and Principal Consultants in Alpha Catalyst Consulting, Azim Pawanchik and Dr. Suraya Sulaiman offer insight as to why this is the case when they compare the culture of Asian innovation practice to the culture of Western innovation practice.

Creative Recognition and How It Works - Chairman's Message for December 2010

2010-12-01T11:01:05Z

It is difficult to know how you are doing in your particular profession when you are working in creativity and innovation. Creativity in whatever endeavour or context is ruled by small continual loops of perception, judgment and reflection. It is not until you create a body of work in whatever practice or context over a period of time that you, as a creator, gain distance from your work. Even then you begin to wonder whether the work has any immediate or long term value or has made meaningful connections or sense with or for others. As a creator, it is not you who judges the effectiveness and quality of your work, it’s others. So, against this backdrop, it was very nice to suddenly be approached by IBM saying I had been selected to be one of the 100 IBM Global Creative Leaders and would I be happy to participate in their on going global study on human capital management coming off the back of their 2010 Global CEO Global Study - Capitalising on Complexity: Creative Leadership is the Way To Go!

Predicting the Outcomes of Creativity and Innovation in Organisations - Chairman's Message October 2010.

2010-10-26T05:08:01Z

Our journey of discovering on this topic began almost two years ago when I wanted to try and assess the value of the creative leadership and creativity programmes we were delivering. The more I inquired the more it became apparent, answers were not easy or readily available. The major national research project “Is Australian management creative and innovative?” the Creative Leadership Forum completed in 2008 further complicated the issue when it revealed over 75% of managers said the creativity and innovation training they received was at best ineffectual, at worst a complete waste of time and money. Since 2008, I have had many conversations with senior leaders in organisations in which they were simply trying to define what innovation actually meant in the context of their organisations, before even starting to plan how to develop strategic thinking around the concept of creativity and innovation.

Why Leadership Styles Matter and Influence Innovation Outcomes - Ralph Kerle

2010-06-28T23:49:13Z

In the past decade, I have listened to many leaders across all sorts of industries and organisations dialogue about innovation but very rarely have I seen organisations actually embody and live the outcomes of these dialogues. Facilitated dialogues and workshops with the endorsement and often participation of company leaders introducing the strategy and tactics of innovation invariably leave participants highly enthused. Yet very often after a relative short period of time, organisations absorb this optimism and little changes. Leaders attest to the many difficulties associated with organisational innovation, not least of which are the political ramifications. Innovation is like a political movement, often polarising entrenched hierarchies, organisational elites and factions. Innovation favours ideators and implementers, those wanting to overthrow the status quo and get on with change, challenging anybody who stands in their way. How a leader handles this ebb and flow of unresolved organisational tension is crucial to the implementation of innovation.

Creatively Intelligent Companies and Leaders: Arts-based Learning for Business

2010-06-03T11:25:27Z

Ted Buswick, co- editor of a special edition of the Journal of Business Strategy entitled "Creatively Intelligent Companies and Leaders: Arts-based Learning for Business” advises the publishers Emerald are offering a week of free online access to all the articles. There are some really well-researched articles on arts-based processes in business that have much to do with creative skills.

Take a look

The Death of A Truly Great 20th Century Inovator - Malcolm McLaren - April 2010

2010-04-25T12:18:20Z

Last week one of the world's truly great innovators passed away. Malcolm McLaren, the inventor of the punk movement. McLaren's life work was that of a Renaisance man, an ideas man who changed popular culture both as an entreprenuer and as an artiste. His journey of invention was often misunderstood by artists, academics and the industry in which he operated because he continually moved outside the norms to create new forms and new products that questioned the accepted practice of his peers. As a manager, he was not a traditional band manager. He interfered artistically. As an artist, he was held in deep suspicion by musicians and practicing artists alike because he was seen as an entrepreneur first, part of the profit making machine artists inherently mistrust. Even worse, he couldn't play a musical instrument using digital sampling technology to create his work way before it was the accepted norm.

If you contrast his first outing publicly as the manager of the Sex Pistols and the recognised founder of the punk movement; his mentoring of Adam Ant and Boy George; his subsequent breaking of world music into popular culture through Duck Rock recorded and filmed in Soweto before the breakdown of Apartheid in South Africa; his contemporising and popularising of opera through Puccini's Madame Butterfly and his final album Paris containing a beautiful and romantic duet with Catherine Deneuve - Paris, Paris, you can see the emergence of the archetypical digital entrepreneur for the 21st century and the associated artistic and business model. He paved the way for all those "punk" young creative garage based internet and software coders, hackers and would be entrepreneurs who broke rules because they could and found ways to make money out of doing that - think Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter. McLaren was like all great entrepreneurs, a racconteur who understood strategic thinking - what made McLaren stand out was his ability to recognise his strength as an ideator, to see "ideas" as an artform in itself and their manifestation being their successful implementation artistically and commercially. Like all great innovators, he failed regularly yet always restlessly sought the next new idea, forever honing his craft - whatever you may label that!!.

A man of our times and one of the modern world's great creative and cultural leaders!

Here is a link to a feature on Malcolm McLaren made in 1984