Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 8

Sparking Strategic Innovation

‘There's no use trying’, said Alice. ‘One can't believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven't had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

The previous chapter outlined six degrees of strategic innovation and provided examples of outcomes which might spur on the development of strategic innovation in any organization or field of endeavour. In this chapter we describe five perspectives which, when combined, can contribute to a process that can spark the bisociative thinking loops described in Chapter 6 and give rise to outcomes in each of the six degree categories, before breakfast or any time after that. The five perspectives which characterize this process of strategic innovation are: diversity, naivety, curiosity, urgency and thinking beyond best practice. The first two attributes, diversity and naivety, describe an openness to new ideas and experiences which relates to the discovery of strategic innovations; the other two traits, curiosity and urgency, describe a more active orientation needed to drive the process of strategic innovation, which relates to our category of creation. The last, thinking beyond best practice, will lead us to a framework for generating strategic innovation that will combine both creation and discovery.

Diversity

The importance of diversity ...