Making Innovation Happen Means Making Creativity Matter

Innovation does not just happen once R&D works, once design matters, rather, it the glue that connects it all to entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial efforts for real usability.

With over 600 responses from +70 CEO’s & COO’s; +400 VP’s with P&L responsibilities; each with +13yrs experience in their roles, and where their firm’s average sales were in the $4.1B range ( adjusted to 2022 currency rates ) one of the overwhelming success factors in the ability to use creativity to enhance and increase the applicability of innovation and rule breaking efforts within firms was the clear connection that it was not age, position or experience level that mattered. With explicit details and solid backing as identified in Making Innovation Happen we see, surprisingly it is a firm’s overall efforts towards failure and learning that matter and not just within the R&D and design efforts themselves that makes for breakthroughs to happen and keep happening leading to overwhelming organizational success.

Firms that made way for individual and group based ( non R&D centric ) innovation and creativity based exploration, experimentation, training and testing were able to see an overwhelmingly significant increase in the adoption of said efforts, and, in the firms ranking highest on individual and organizational creativity and innovation. The undeniable factor uncovered is that when individuals with high levels of direct contact and autonomous interface with end users come into contact with problems and needs that can be ” tweaked ” to accommodate the capabilities of specific R&D based efforts, these are the organizations that have the highest levels of innovation and creativity success because those organizations feel comfortable with the risks of ” tweeks ” leading to high levels of usage. More, these organizations have the highest level of training and failure acceptance vs. firms who don’t reward such efforts and where these firms ” reap greater benefits from [ recruited ] individual employees who are innately creative