We all want and need creativity in our personal lives and at work. But how can we nurture, encourage and use creativity successfully? Patrick Harris offers some suggestions.

A major new study involving some 3,500 executives has highlighted the key skills that innovative and creative entrepreneurs need to develop. The six-year-long research into disruptive innovation by INSEAD professor Hal Gregersen, Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Clayton Christensen of Harvard, outlines five 'discovery' skills you need. But, says Gregersen, you don’t have to be ‘great in everything.’

In recent years, many of the most significant corporate success stories have been because of IT innovations. Despite the gloomy economic mood, success stories like Amazon's Kindle demonstrate that the value of IT innovation has not diminished. In fact, leading executives understand that IT innovation is a major factor for their companies' bottom lines and future growth.

Multinational corporations have a lot of good things going for them. They have built up a rich store of knowledge over the years, allowing their subsidiaries to share ideas and best practices in ways that smaller companies can only dream of. They also exploit their vast global reach and on-the-ground knowledge to sniff out new concepts or products being used by rival companies in other parts of the world. But these processes aren't always as successful as they could be. Felipe Monteiro, a Wharton professor of management whose recent research looks at how and when new knowledge gets the thumbs up within firms, explains why.

Executives say innovation is very important, but their companies' approach to it is often informal, and leaders lack confidence in their innovation decisions. Top managers and other professionals agree that the biggest challenge is talent but disagree on why. Nonetheless, executives agree on some steps to improve innovation.

A recent McKinsey Global Survey shows that companies are satisfied, overall, with their use of metrics to assess innovation portfolios - though many findings suggest that they shouldn't be. The companies that get the highest returns from innovation do use metrics well; these organizations tend to assess innovation more comprehensively than the others.

We all want breakthroughs; it's just that we can't know exactly which of the bold new ideas will break through. It's is also hard to get traction for ideas that are so far ahead of their times that the infrastructure or human habits do not yet support them.

As many technology companies have seen to their peril, you can leap much too far into the future by seeking revolution, not evolution, leaving potential users in the dust. But steady progress — step by single step — can win internal support and the external race for share of market or share of mind. Especially if you take each step quickly.

Companies can improve their innovation performance by getting their formal and informal organizations in sync.

As a recently released federal task force report emphasized, Canadian companies need to become more competitive. But “competitive” these days is practically synonymous with “innovative.” The issue is a “But” because there is a dearth of knowledge, especially in Canada, on how companies around the world innovate. These authors researched companies around the world, and their findings, described in this article, will help Canadian companies jump start their efforts to become more innovative.

In stealth-like fashion, outsourcing can erode a manufacturer’s competitive advantage. Believing that profits will rise if it starts to outsource, a company can lose sight of the fact that it is gradually – and unwittingly – losing the capabilities that have differentiated it. But turning inward, specifically to employees, and enabling them to re-capture the company’s reputation for process innovation will help re-build a sound platform for success.

It could be construed as “going back to the future,” but working in a more concrete world – not in the virtual world – can change the way we look at and think about many things. The value of such a profound change resides in its proven ability to spur innovation. These authors describe how individuals and organizations can effect such a change.

The quest for competitive advantage drives companies to increase both efficiency and responsiveness to customers, but there is a trade-off between the two. Improving responsiveness to customers entails higher inventory, distributed warehousing, and multiple transportation channels that raise costs and compromise efficiency. Companies find this balance harder to achieve in emerging markets because of constraints in the external environment like infrastructural bottlenecks and talent shortages. This doesn’t mean a balance between efficiency and responsiveness is unattainable.

Executives say innovation is very important, but their companies’ approach to it is often informal, and leaders lack confidence in their innovation decisions. Top managers and other professionals agree that the biggest challenge is talent but disagree on why. Nonetheless, executives agree on some steps to improve innovation.

A recent McKinsey Global Survey shows that companies are satisfied, overall, with their use of metrics to assess innovation portfolios—though many findings suggest that they shouldn’t be. The companies that get the highest returns from innovation do use metrics well; these organizations tend to assess innovation more comprehensively than the others.

The creation of knowledge, products, and services by online communities of companies and consumers is still in its earliest stages. Who knows where it will lead?

Metrics that convey the effectiveness of an innovative new product can affect that product’s success. For example, the concept of horsepower was invented to measure the power of the steam engine. More recently, metrics have been invented for “clock speed” of microprocessors and “gallons per 100 miles” for fuel efficiency. Using innovative metrics can make it easier for marketers to appeal to potential customers by articulating the product’s value in a language consumers already understand.

Patents reveal the most innovative places to do it.

Big companies are good at innovating within silos, but woefully bad at combining creative energies across divisions to build new businesses. The problem, we believe, is structural: Business-unit boundaries exist precisely because they create efficient structures for executing strategy. But silo focus and ruthless efficiency come at the cost of cross-divisional collaboration, so some innovation opportunities are either poorly executed or not seen at all. The solution, we think, lies not in reorganization but in informal communication through the social networks that exist throughout the company. These networks must be shaped and cultivated to efficiently find and exploit innovations.

To consistently turn out profitable new offerings, companies must integrate three distinct innovation portfolios.

If organizations are to achieve and sustain high performance, they need to regard innovation as a business discipline, and then manage and execute it accordingly—as an end-to-end process, from insight development to idea generation to development to marketplace launch.

Many factors drive a company's performance, not the least of which are entrepreneurial creativity and managerial effectiveness. In two papers recently presented at the fifth annual Atlanta Competitive Advantage Conference (ACAC) at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, U.S. and Australian faculty presented their research on the effects of group mood and managerial mental models on creative and structural dynamics, offering strategies for enhanced business success. Among the findings? Managerial creativity and intuition are not easily copied and thus provide a distinct source of competitive advantage.

Lo and behold, contests actually work to spur innovation. So should we use them for everything?

If you have accepted "innovator" as some part of your identity, what sort of innovator are you? Venkat Rao offers a dictionary of personality types he's encountered and offers some of his favorite examples from history.

How do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that produced "Mona Lisa" as well as the one that spawned the theory of relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, da Vincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?

The frequently occurring challenges to innovation and new ventures in large corporations are:
1. the lack of vision at the executive level
2. the initial magnitude of the opportunity
3. the internal competition
4. the availability of resources
5. the isolation of the innovative function