Well if you work as a Business Coach with innovative companies as ideal target clients it is easy to assume that everyone shares the same words and concepts about INNOVATION.
In the words of Benny Hill "Assumptions makes an ASS out of U and ME" ASSUME - geddit?
So earlier this month my assumptions were challenged at a conference about Open Innovation. It was soon clear that people undestood completely different things from the word INNOVATION and indeed OPEN INNOVATION. I seemed to have arrived back in the early 2000s before Chesbrough's book had been published. There appeared to be a significant task remaining to agree nomenclature for INNOVATION related topics before a useful discussion could be had.
I reflected upon an earlier experience in may earlier work in the aviation electronics industry where one word stood for many different activities in the system development process: TEST. We only started to make progress in understanding this stage of a complex system development when we broke down the sub-stages below "TEST" and created an agreed naming for each of the parts. Until that happen "TEST" could have been replaced in the project plans with "THEN MIRACLE OCCURS".
This experience has made me see that there is still a need for clarity in what we call things in the INNOVATION process. That's what this blog is about.
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