Innovation is Change

Braden Kelley is an innovation and change specialist, the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, an InnovationExcellence.com co-Founder, and is the creator of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and a book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (January 2016 release).

  Change Management   Innovation  

Can you think of a single innovation that didn’t change something?

I didn’t think so. Innovation is change, or at least, innovation requires change. In my role as an innovation keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, I recently led a German-based industrial company’s North American IT leadership team through an innovation workshop, during which we spent part of the time working to define their common language of innovation (as described in my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire). For companies looking to build a sustainable innovation capability, this is an important first step.

One of the biggest reasons it is important to define innovation and to spend time creating a common language of innovation is that the word “innovation” means something different to every individual. It is very easy for companies to spin their wheels when people don’t have the same understanding of what constitutes innovation and what doesn’t.

Because of this danger, when working with companies to help build an innovation system I always make sure that we define what they want innovation to mean in their organization and what their vision, strategy and goals are going to be for innovation. This helps get everyone on the same page and causes people to start …

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