50 Ways to Foster a Sustainable Culture of Innovation - Idea Champions - Mitch Ditkoff

Note From Jim:

Are you innovative? Do you foster innovation? The 50 suggestions made by the very impressive Mitch Ditkoff are sure to assist your mastery. 

Of these 50, my top 10 favorites:

2. Wherever you can, whenever you can, always drive fear out of the workplace. Fear is "Public Enemy #1" of an innovative culture.

5. Make new mistakes.

6. As far as the future is concerned, don't speculate on what might happen, but imagine what you can make happen.

14. Embrace and celebrate failure. 50 to 70 per cent of all new product innovations fail at even the most successful companies. The main difference between companies who succeed at innovation and those who don't isn't their rate of success -- it's the fact that successful companies have a LOT of ideas, pilots, and product innovations in the pipeline.

23. Make sure people are working on the right issues. Identify specific business challenges to focus on. Be able to frame these issues as questions that start with the words, "How can we?"

27. Make customers your innovation partners, while realizing that customers are often limited to incremental innovations, not breakthrough ones.

32. Avoid analysis paralysis. Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction

33. Before reaching closure on any course of action, seek alternatives. Make it a discipline to seek the idea after the "best" idea emerges.

35. A great source of new ideas are people that are new to the company. Get new hires together and tap their brainpower and imagination.

42. Give your people specific, compelling, and measurable innovation goals.

Best everyway & always - Jim

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Access Mitch's Article: http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2012/12/50_ways_to_fost_1.shtml

Mitch Ditkoff is the co-founder and President of Idea Champions, a highly acclaimed management consulting and training company, headquartered in Woodstock, NY. He specializes in helping forward thinking organizations go beyond business as usual, originate breakthrough products and services, and establish dynamic, sustainable cultures of innovation.

Educated at Lafayette College and Brown University, Mitch has worked with a wide variety of Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies who have realized the need to do something different in order to succeed in today's rapidly changing marketplace. These clients include: GE, Merck, AT&T, Allianz, Lucent Technologies, NBC Universal, Goodyear, A&E Television Networks, General Mills, MTV Networks, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and a host of others.