|
Thousands of great ideas are generated in conference rooms and brainstorming retreats every day. There are now more creativity and innovation courses, training seminars, conferences, and consultants than ever before. It would seem that with so many resources available, the business world should be ripe with original, cutting-edge ideas. But if those ideas aren’t addressing your company’s needs, even if they are brilliant, they will come to be useful.
Creativity and innovation guru Arthur VanGundy sees the difficulty as a case of solving problems before we know what the problem really is. Organizations neglect to ask the right questions that would accurately define their strategic challenges. People are cranking out good ideas simply to maintain their strategic direction -- without even considering if it’s the right one. They’re locked into old traditions and cultures, market uncertainties, managerial apathy, or a workplace so frantically busy that it’s easier to just stay the original course. In such circumstances, discovering truly innovative products, processes, or growth strategies is nearly impossible.
Getting to Innovation helps you break free of outdated assumptions and misdirected approaches by asking the most pertinent, meaningful questions about your organization, what it does and does not do, and what it should do. Packed with real-world examples and hundreds of sample questions you can use for your own company, the book shows you how to:
- Use seven essential criteria for evaluating potential innovation challenges
- Write positioning and rationale statements for each challenge
- Link together multiple objectives in priority frameworks
- Use the top 10 techniques for generating ideas
- Select the best ideas from the many that have been generated
- Design and facilitate productive brainstorming retreats, and more
It’s not just more ideas your organization needs, but more questions --the properly framed questions that test assumptions and that can be molded into powerful tools. Gettting to Innovation helps you hone in on the questions that will drive creative thinking and innovation throughout your company.
Arthur B. (Andy) VanGundy, Ph.D., is an internationally noted expert on idea-generation techniques and framing innovation challenges and the author of more than 15 books. He is a professor of communication at the University of Oklahoma and president of VanGundy & Associates, a creativity and innovation consulting firm. His clients have included Air Canada, Hershey Foods, Monsanto, and Xerox. He lives in Norman, Oklahoma.
|
