Innovation is a necessity for survival for companies in the modem era. Building an organization that fosters innovation is a goal every firm should aspire to.

Innovation

1. Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis of opportunities.

2. The second imperative of innovation is to go out to look, to ask, to listen.

3. An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused. It should do only one thing, otherwise, it confuses. If it is not simple, it won't work All effective innovations are breathtakingly simple. Indeed, the greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say: "This is obvious, Why didn't I think of it?"

4. Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing. Innovations had better be capable of being started small, requiring at first little money, few people, and only a small and limited market. Otherwise, there is not enough time to make the adjustments and changes that are almost always needed for an innovation to succeed. Initially, innovations are rarely more than "almost right".

"Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome" -David Loyd George.

"All glory comes from daring to begin " -Eugene Ware

1. Don't try to be too clever. Innovations have to be handled by ordinary human beings, and if they are to attain any size and importance at all by morons and near morons. Incompetence, after all, is the only thing in abundant and never failing supply.

2. Don't diversify, don't splinter, don't try to do too many things at once. Innovations that stray from a core are likely to become diffuse. They remain ideas and do not become innovations.

3. Don't try to innovate for the future Innovate for the present! The first innovator who truly understood this was probably Thomas Edison. Every other electrical inventor of the time began to work around 1860-65 on what eventually became the light bulb. Edison waited ten years until the knowledge became available; up to that point, work on the light bulb was "of the future." But, when the knowledge became available - when in other words, a light bulb could become "the present" - Edison organized his tremendous energies and an extraordinarily capable staff and concentrated for a couple of years on that one innovative opportunity.

Innovation is work

Credit - Innovation and
Entrepreneurship, Harper &
Row, Peter Drucker, 1985.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -Albert Einstein

World Medical Mfg. Corp.
13794 N.W. 4th St., Bldg. 210
Sunrise, Florida 33325
Fax No.

Written by Howard J. Leonhardt

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