Notes on Becoming More Innovative in 2014

Organizations don't innovate, people do. Organizations that are admired for being especially innovative don't hire genetically different people than are available to the rest of us, they just make different managerial choices that allow their people to be more innovative. Leadership does this (or, doesn't), and, as a result, innovative people deserve innovative leaders! So here comes the eternal question: how do I, myself, become more innovative? (or, at least, a better leader of innovative people?).

So, what can you do in the coming year to become a more innovative performer, or leader? Over the past two years (2012 and 2013), I've suggested a small set of innovation resolutions that would help anyone become more innovative, and which did not require investments, the mastery of new skills, nor require "permission" from above. This year, in anticipation of trying to become more personally innovative in 2014, and in the spirit of inclusiveness (which was among my 2013 resolutions), I have invited a number of friends who I admire for their insights into innovation to share their resolutions. The result was a thoughtful, relatively global and certainly ambitious set of advice, all of which has one overall objective: to make us all more innovative in 2014!  The blog appears on the Forbes.com site at this link.

The friends that I invited are all particularly insightful tweeters about innovation who I follow regularly. Many of them have blogs that appear in my blog roll. Let me tell you a bit about them:

Abhijit Bhaduri is the Chief Learning Offier of the Bangalore-based, Global IT Services leader, Wipro.  Abhijit is one of those multi-talented, quintessential T-shaped people who is also the author of Don’t Hire The Best & the MBAseries (business-oriented novels which include: Mediocre But Arrogant, and Married But Available. ).

Alex Osterwalder is the lead-author of a book that has changed the way I, and many, many other people, think about business models, and which has given us the ability to prototype the financial viability of a new idea at the same time as we prototype the physical attributes and commercial attractiveness of the idea. Alex is also co-founder of Strategyzer.com