Innovation Management: Part 1 A Breakthrough Approach to Organizational Excellence

There is an ongoing need to explore opportunities and build a healthy and prosperous future, create new revenue streams and wealth, discover new solutions, and transform our organizations, industries, and societies. This need leads us to focus on innovation management. Through innovation management, order can be found in chaos, while nations, industries and economies can be pulled out of crisis. This will lead to a new foundation for growth and prosperity, which may be realized sooner rather than later.

Despite the growing awareness that innovation is the only sustainable source of growth, competitive advantage, and new wealth, the Council on Competitive Report [1] and a recent Arthur D. Little survey of 700 global companies and their executives found fewer than 25 percent of the companies believe innovation performance is where it needs to be if they are to be successful in the competitive global marketplace. Having tried endless alternatives, company leaders are now ready to accept innovation management as a key operational discipline, just as in the past they adopted the disciplines of quality, strategic planning, and performance management systems [2]. Innovation management is not a new concept in most organizations. However, the old tried and true ways, even those that may have worked in the past, are no longer adequate for the organizations of tomorrow. Across the board, organizations are engaged in new and exciting experiments to reinvent the way they conceptualise and create the future, because the old business-as-usual approaches have not produced the desired results [3].