It doesn't take a degree to be innovative!

I've been saying this for a while - with no backup but my own network to look at - the true innovative ideas is not (only) coming from the well educated portion of the employees. Without finding a paper to support that idea but a lot of other voices in the blogosphere, I tried to do a picture search on flickr on "innovative" and this picture came up.


It has a slightly different approach to the sources to innovative ideas (as the title says), but interesting fact here is not that employees are top scores here. What's more interesting is that the second, third, forth, fifth AND sixth place are EXTERNAL sources - something a lot of companies have not realized yet.

I think today this list in most companies (if asked) would read: Employees, Internal sales and R&D (in that order)
Where the Sales dep. by historic reference is taking the "external vibes" into the company... well it does to some degree i guess, but i doubt it does so in the amount of ideas combined in the external sources listed.

Reasons for not recognizing (some of) the external sources:

Customers - "They don't know what's good for them?"

Competitors - "They would just steal our ideas!"


Do you have "quotes" for the other external sources ??

Read the article related to the picture here

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The most important factor driving innovation is a company’s internal culture

New ways of measuring innovation points to internal company culture as one of the lead factors in defining a company as innovative.

I know there has been discussions weather beanbags and such could spur the innovative culture in a company - which it still can't !! But rather it's the overall mindset of the people working in that company which defines the culture.

This is also interesting when it comes to talking about idea-generation and management systems such as Dell's Ideastorm and Idéoffensiv - a danish county's idea generation tool made by Socialsquare.

Because one thing is setting up the physical collection of ideas from various sources, another is actually qualifying those ideas into use full information and in turn projects/solutions.

This is where the culture of the company comes to play - if the ideation is not supported in the company, a lot of ideas won't make the difference. They have to be matured...


Read the whole article on Innovationtools

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