How do you foster innovation?

There is a plethora of literature about creating organisational capability for innovation. The term "innovation culture" is used widely, often to describe a set of guidelines or loose methodologies that encourage innovative activity within the organisational structure.

The stimulating environment, such as Google's headquarters which feature 'games rooms' and giant slides for employees, and the engaging 'innovation programmes' that foster collaboration or out of thebox thinking among teams, are obvious and somewhat simplistic approaches to creating an impetus for innovation.

For these outward manifestations to work, however, there must be a more fundamental approach to engaging individuals in learning and using thinking tools that enable them to find better, faster and often cheaper ways of delivering value to customers.

It is this personal level of innovation that is of most interest. This is the aspect of focused creative thinking that involves the operation of the brain, the socialisation within the workplace, the perception, knowledge and understanding that comes from customer intimacy and the thinking frameworks that can be adopted to provide coherent adaptations or adoptions of ideas for the benefit of a "customer".

On this site, we're referring to innovation as a way of thinking and we're bringing together ideas that may synthesise into a clear understanding of how innovation thinking works and can be encouraged or even developed within organisations.

Useful weblinks:

http://innovationoxford.blogspot.com/ -- Treve Willis's blog on innovation

http://www.dius.gov.uk/publications/ScienceInnovation.pdf -- the UK Government's latest opus on the topic