… and how do you know if your company has it?

If your company values and promotes a culture of innovation, that is a good sign.  Innovative workplace cultures foster work environments where innovative processes, ideas and approaches are encouraged and taken seriously. Organizations that lead the way in innovation management define innovation as a cultural value and a tangible asset.

The reality is that innovation–or the lack of it–manifests in the way a business is managed.

If innovation is not present at the core of a business’s values, structure, culture, and processes, there will never be enough innovation in products and services to remain competitive…or perhaps even viable.

“Management innovation is the implementation of new management systems, practices, processes or norms that are noticeably different from previous approaches to management because they are relevant…today.”

On the surface of it, you wouldn’t think that it would take anything but common sense to manage a company, department, or work group differently than was done 100 years ago–after all, this is the 21st century...”Look how far we’ve come!”

It surprises many people to learn that most of the fundamental principles of management that are still applied in business today, are the same ones that originated during the Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the 20th century.

When management principles were originally conceived and applied over 100 years ago, they were extremely innovative. They were innovative because they helped companies tackle the business and economic issues of the day in new ways. With new approaches and processes they were able to let go of old ideas about how to get work done in a faster paced, higher-demand, more competitive world.

The important thing to carry forward, however (and this is where many organizations get it wrong) is not to repeat and perpetuate the solutions of old simply because they worked so well back then, but to break out of the mold–as they did –to seize upon new, experimental, and unheard of ways of doing things that fit today’s world and the one we are heading into.

The real legacy of innovators like Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford was not the rationalized worker systems and production lines for which they are primarily credited (and which later became outdated as both technology and views on worker rights and culture advanced)–but the totally innovative example they left us for imagining and implementing new ways of working.

Courage, vision, imagination, and leadership to work in a new way; that is innovation management.