COLLEGE

ENT ASSIGNMENT ON CrEaTiViTy & InNoVaTiOn -By Vinay Kumar

Without the playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable."- Carl Jung

Principles of Innovation..?
1. Think Small
Peter Drucker once wrote, Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. Take a look at any really, really big thing and, inevitably, it modest origins. Microsoft became one of the worlds most valuable companies by focusing on software, an area so inconsequential at the time that IBM was willing to write it off. Apple made a splash with the Macintosh in large part by capitalizing on innovations that Xerox overlooked.

2. Innovation is Combination
It means that important breakthroughs usually come from synthesizing ideas from different domains. A more recent example is the Apple ecosystem. There were plenty of digital music players around when Steve Jobs launched the i-Pod, but he combined his player with i-Tunes, which made content both more accessible and palatable to music companies. He then threw new products into the mix the i-Phone, i-Pad and now Siri creating more combinations and greater value.

3. Passion and Perseverance Are Key

The problem with combinations is that finding the right ones takes time. Larry Page and Sergei Brin combined the system of academic cites with computer technology to develop the worlds greatest search engine. However, it was years before they stumbled upon Overtures business model and found the combination that actually made money.

4. The 70/20/10 Portfolio

Of course, beyond all the happy talk, businesses must do more than just innovate. They need to serve customers, pay employees (and sometimes congressmen) and earn money. So prattling on about embracing creativity and failure often gets thrown to the wayside when its time to make budget. Nevertheless, professor Kastelle brings workable scheme to the table with his three horizons model.

You want to put 70% of your innovation efforts toward taking your competitors money You want to put 20% of your innovation efforts toward taking somebody elses money (often a customer or supplier) You want to put 10% of you innovation efforts toward creating something new and cool.

5. Technology Adoption Curve - Adoption is the risk for any innovation. New tools and practices are not adopted overnight. Like a bottle of perfume opened in the corner that slowly spreads throughout the room, innovations slowly diffuse through society. Understanding this process is critical, as new ideas are embraced first by "early adopters" all the way through to "skeptics".

6. Skunk works - It is often useful to separate an innovative business unit logically and physically from the rigors (standards, reporting, ROI) of the parent company. The term 'Skunk works' derives from a Lockheed Martin group that was separated from the corporate parent and was very successful in developing many new airplanes. This technique was also employed at Apple by the Mac Group that took up separate offices and flew a pirate flag above their building.

7. Prototype & Iterate - Some flaws are just not that obvious until you try to use the product. On the first typewriters you couldn't see what you were typing until the page came out of the machine 15-20 lines later! Visible type was considered an innovation in typewriters! Later someone invented the "Shift" key so that keyboards didn't need separate keys for capital and lowercase letters!

Druckers Five Principles of Innovation

Below are five principles that can help you take advantage of a new innovation you may have discovered: 1. Begin with an analysis of the opportunity. 2. Analyze the opportunity to see if people will be Interested in using the innovation. 3. To be effective, the innovation must be simple and clearly focused on a specific need. 4. Effective innovations start small. By appealing to a small, limited market, a product or service requires little money and few people to produce and sell it. As the market grows, the company has time to fine tune its processes and stay ahead of the emerging competition. 5. Aim at market leadership. If an innovation does not aim at leadership in the beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough to successfully establish itself. Leadership here can mean dominating a small market niche.

If todays problems arent solved there will never be any future to invent- Greg