The other day my son came to me and asked if I liked his new machine. He’d used various bits and pieces from a plastic workbench to put it together and was very proud when he handed it to me. “What is it?” I asked him.
“A good luck / bad luck machine. When you have good luck the machine on this side makes sure it cancels out any bad luck on the other side”, he explained.
Apart from being very inventive, I think my son’s machine taught me something about creativity and innovation. Often, lots of money and expense is made to make a company more innovative but then there are no results (bad luck!). But everyone can see what value new ideas would have for the business and how then could give competitive advantage (good luck!). The question is how to get the machine to balance in your favour.
Part of the answer is to realise it is a gradual process, which rarely works instantly. Secondly, a company needs to realise creativity needs to fit with their culture, so any programme needs to be tailored to it. You can’t just take an off the shelf system that works for, say, 3M and assume it will work for you. So it may seem like your creativity plans failed in the short term, but don’t worry. Somewhere there is a machine that is equalling out this bad luck and if you put in the time the innovative good luck will appear.
0 comments:
Post a Comment