Innovation Implementation

Discover creativity’s role in innovation. Learn why both are critical to your organization—and to you.

What is innovation?

The concepts of innovation and creativity together constitute the lifeblood of value creation. But they’re hard to define. Because the terms are overused, they’re also riddled with misconceptions. What do we really mean by “innovation” and “creativity”?

Innovation defined

Peter Drucker, the legendary management expert, once said: “Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.” He called innovation “the specific instrument of entrepreneurship…the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”

Innovation is: Conceiving and translating an idea or invention into a new product, service, business process, or business model that creates value.

But coming up with a definition of innovation often depends on who you ask. Some experts and businesspeople consider the word overused. In their view, what many people call an innovation is really just a very good product or a process improvement that isn’t a game-changer.

Purists use the word innovation to refer only to inventions that alter civilization—things like electricity, the printing press, the car, the telephone, and the internet.

But most other people recognize a spectrum of meanings. In their view, innovation can be:

• Inventing a product that has never existed—such as packing material that inflates around the packed goods
• Converting a byproduct or overlooked commodity into a profitable product—such as turning leftover cranberry skins into a consumer snack food

Extending a product’s scope and application—such as discovering that a vaccine developed for infants also helps seniors

Apart of activities delivery, we are recommending the effective debriefing methodology into our training program so that learning retention can be captured and sustained.