The 10 Un-Commandments of Corporate Innovation

Innovation tends to come into vogue every few years with the popular media coming out with a host of most innovative companies, management gurus talking about innovation best practices and various research studies that point to the impact of innovation on revenue, shareholder returns, etc. You get the point. Lots of fluff.

With all the talk of innovation best practices, I thought I'd offer 10 Un-Commandments of Innovation. These are basically the things I think all of us seeking innovation should avoid.

Un-Commandment #1

Thou shall not overuse words like ideation, anything 2.0 and wisdom of crowds

When innovation becomes the rage, it is usually accompanied with an annoying new vocabulary which people incessantly use to sound smart. During the "dot com boom", B2C and B2B marketplaces and e-tailing were all the rage. Now innovation talk tends to use new words like ideation which really is not a word at all but which consultants love. Or there is the ever popular "2.0" (read: "two dot oh" or "two point oh") which people append it to anything to make it seem new and fresh. And then there is popular wisdom of crowds' idea which has become ridiculously adulterated with everyone using this for any variety of purposes including launching inane businesses. Social networking, software as a service, business intelligencethe list goes on, but you get the point. Some of these already are or will go onto become major forces in shaking up industries, but refrain from overusing these.

Un-Commandment #2
Thou will not study Google, 3M, and P&G and assume you can emulate their "best practices"

Here's a favorite one consultants love to hawk and it goes a little something like this. Let's find elements from each of the "best-in-class" innovators and "leverage these learnings" to develop the client's innovation practices. We're not saying this is not valuable. There are companies who have great innovation practices, but these should be studied as stories and not science. Innovation is not like chemistry where adding one part of Google's practices + two parts of 3Ms + a dash of P&G will lead to innovation. It is an inherently imprecise calculation.

Innovation ultimately is a very personal' thing for an organization and the innovation agenda or innovation program must be developed considering the organization's people, culture, incentives, processes, past performance, and the list goes on. Getting

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