Personal Creativity Reflection

Course Activities 13

What Makes Organizations Innovative?

As discussed above, the competitive nature of the global economy both drives innovation and needs

innovation to thrive. What can organizations in todays fast paced world do to keep up with their

rapidly innovating competitors?

Companies can make smart hires. People monitor and maintain an adequate proportion of high

discovery-quotient people in every management level, functional area, and decision making stage of

the business process. Employees in every department must take risks and have the courage to innovate.

They must follow the innovators DNA model and question, observe, network, and experiment.

Finally, to draw everything together, they must apply cognitive skills to synthesize novel inputs from

their behavioral skills.

Processes must be efficient and well thought out. For example, IDEOs deep dive and design thinking

exercises work very well for what they do. They discover, interpret, ideate, experiment, and evolve.

Finally, it is the founding philosophy of the company that shapes the culture of the organization. The

culture of Apple is to Think Different, a principle they still embody today. It led them to lead the

digital music revolution and to build the best computers in the world. They have a highly secretive

culture, but it works for their company. Tesla also is another company with a distinctive culture. Teslas

view is that theyd like to innovate so fast that they invalidate their own patents. Other companies like

Google, Facebook, and Amazon embrace different types of cultures. Taking the time to go through

companies whose products or services I interact with daily was very interesting to me, and I would love to

have spent more time on this so that I could have learned more about the companies whose products I use.