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Home > Executive Report > Features
What is the source of true innovation? What are the processes by which it occurs on projects? In gathering to discuss the elusive subject, leaders of business and academia wrestled with several contradictions and forged some collective insights. For one, the lean revolution might map a way to cost-saving efficiencies, but innovation of the revenue-producing kind requires an "abundant" mindset.
Harvard Business School professor Rob Austin, program co-chair for last year’s Innovation Symposium, invited me to attend the National Science Foundation and Harvard University-sponsored event after I’d told him that investigating the source of innovation sounded paradoxical. Science stumbles on paradox, and Rob wanted to show me how his methodology was coping with what I considered to be inevitable contradictions. Interestingly, the delegates, representing the finest minds studying business innovation today, often found ourselves confronting koans as we considered case studies and scientific enquiries into the source of real business innovation.
The Symposium defined innovation as “useful variation.” The strictest interpretations of process control construe as bad any variation from predefined process. Yet innovation, which we recognize as a good thing when it creates something useful, apparently requires variation, an otherwise bad thing, to exist first.
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