Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 6

The Bisociations of Strategic Innovation

Without innovation art is a corpse.

Winston Churchill

The rhetoric surrounding the dramatic phrase ‘innovate or die’ may be new, but the principle is not. Francis Bacon, most famous for the expression ‘knowledge is power’, put it thus over 500 years ago: ‘He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.’ By the same token, there is increasing evidence to suggest that organizations that do not innovate will be over-taken and left behind. Indeed, global competition and technological change place increased pressure on organisations to have innovation at the core of their strategy. While we argue that for that innovation to be effective, or strategic, it must be developed with one eye on the other elements of the creative strategy – entrepreneurship, leadership and organization – without innovation this whole enterprise is bereft. Hence, the heart of creative strategy must be strategic innovation.

Using the three-part definition developed in previous chapters, this part of the book examines the content, outcomes and process of strategic innovation. In this chapter we explore why there is a greater need for strategic innovation now and introduce theories suggesting that this innovation is driven by bisociative contents of

• newness and originality, and
• creation and discovery.

Chapter 7 outlines six generic outcomes of strategic innovation:

• added value,
• reduced cost,
• increased volume or capacity,
• better market relationships, ...