Jeffrey Phillips on Making Us More Innovative

Last week, I had a chat with Jeffrey while we were at the Front End of Innovation conference.  It was nice to finally meet Jeffery.  We have had many good exchanges via email and in the blogosphere.  The meeting also reminded me of the copy of Jeffrey’s recent book, “Make Us More Innovative”, sitting on my desk at home among a dozen other books on my reading list.  So this past weekend, I sat down and read Jeffrey’s book.

“Make Us More Innovative” is an accessible compendium of practical insights.  Drawing upon his years of experience in a variety of corporate and consulting positions, Jeffrey brings the basic themes of Innovate on Purpose to life as he provides advice on how to identify the key needs in an organization and fill the gaps to build a robust innovation environment.

The book begins by outlining twelve steps to building a corporate innovation program.  The subsequent chapters then unfold expanding on each of the steps in simple terms that make it easy to imagine the relevance to ones own situation.

All in all, “Make Us More Innovative” is a quick and easy read that helps organize many of the basic concepts one has to consider is tackling the problem of how to go about building a sustainable innovation practices.  I think one of Jeffery’s most important bits of advice is found in the chapter on Developing a culture of innovation.  Jeffrey writes, “Merely setting up an innovation team and establishing an innovation process is not enough.  If the management team does not fully support innovation initiatives through their communications, their priorities and their actions, no amount of cultural change will result in a successful innovation initiative.”

This is exactly the point my recent post, The Innovation Executive, and why executive leadership is the first of the Five Pillars of Sustainable Innovation Culture.

Comments

[Tim]

thanks for the link, I will check this book out. My thoughts are that the actual innovation cannot be taught itself, this is pure creativity and if it was teachable everyone would be doing it! What can be taught is how to capture innovation in an organisation and more importantly implementation of ideas once they have gone through the qa process.

thoughts?

[James Todhunter]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the comment. My thinking on this is a bit different. Innovation is a highly transferable skill. There is too much to say on this in a quick comment, so I will put together an short article on why this is so. Stay tuned...

Cheers,

Jim

[Jeffrey]

Jim:
It was good to meet at the Front End and exchange some ideas and perspectives on innovation. Thanks for the review of Make us more Innovative!