{"id":720,"date":"2007-06-06T01:00:58","date_gmt":"2007-06-06T09:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=720"},"modified":"2007-06-06T01:01:17","modified_gmt":"2007-06-06T09:01:17","slug":"redefining-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=720","title":{"rendered":"Redefining Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The American Heritage Dictionary simply defines innovation as \u201cThe act of introducing something new.\u201d\u00a0 ((American Heritage Dictionary.\u00a0 Retrieved from http:\/\/www.dictionary.com on April 3, 2007.))<\/p>\n

ZDnet has a pretty nice CIO interview series.\u00a0 In one of them<\/a>, Steve Cooper, the CIO of the Red Cross talks about innovation and some of their hurdles from the Hurricane Katrina disaster.\u00a0 Mr. Cooper states, \u201cI used to think that innovation represented brand new ideas that nobody had thought up before. Now what I realize is that innovation can take additional forms. It can simply be the application or reuse of other people\u2019s ideas in an environment where that idea has not been introduced before.\u201d\u00a0 ((Cooper, Scott.\u00a0 \u201cFostering innovation in the midst of disasters.\u201d\u00a0 Retrieved from http:\/\/www.zdnet.com on April 3, 2007.))<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not entirely sure I agree with his definition of innovation.\u00a0 I think that for the most part, we think of innovation as something that is new to the world, an idea that will give our company a cutting edge advantage for a period of time.\u00a0 Mr. Cooper\u2019s redefinition strikes me as simply catching up to your competitors.\u00a0 He does however have some ideas on fostering innovation.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve tried to do and how I believe you can create and influence a culture of innovation and, quite frankly, a culture of risk taking \u2013 appropriate risk taking \u2013 is to leverage a level of what we\u2019ve labeled a \u201ccenter of excellence.\u201d So you take people who are bright, talented, not afraid to fail, not afraid to take risks, who can think out of the box, so to speak, I know that\u2019s a bit of a clich\u00e9 phrase, but it really does mean to think differently than the way things are normally done, and to give them really difficult problems. You give that to a couple centers of excellence, and the centers of excellence, by the way, might be uniform skill sets.\u00a0 ((Ibid))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So put a real pilot in place and see whether it works. If it works, then what we want to do is begin to expand that out to more and more geography, more parts of the business, to more business units. If it doesn\u2019t work, we don\u2019t give up. We take a look and say \u201cwell, what happened here? How come we expected this to happen, it didn\u2019t happen.\u201d We make adjustments and we kind of go at it again.\u00a0 ((Ibid))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Instead we\u2019ve created a very small, six people, six people, innovation center and it is literally named \u201cinnovation center.\u201d\u00a0 Those people are not focused on pie in the sky over the horizon technology. They work directly with our client account managers, the customer facing folks that work directly with business units and they\u2019re part of the IT organization but they\u2019re business people. They\u2019re requirements analysis people. They understand business first and they may have some, but they\u2019re not in deep technology experts. They figure out what are the business objectives, goals, challenges that are face by our business units. They then sit down with the innovation center staff and they say \u201chey look, I need to figure out a way to\u2026\u201d\u00a0 ((Ibid))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The American Heritage Dictionary simply defines innovation as \u201cThe act of introducing something new.\u201d\u00a0 ((American Heritage Dictionary.\u00a0 Retrieved from http:\/\/www.dictionary.com on April 3, 2007.)) ZDnet has a pretty nice CIO interview series.\u00a0 In one of them, Steve Cooper, the CIO…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}