If you were at risk of losing your only source of income you’d probably stretch your creativity to the limit to find ways of preventing this from happening.
There’s one ‘profession’ that is constantly under threat - crime. Therefore, it’s not surprising that we can find many creative ideas in this field. It’s also not surprising that professional criminals are usually more creative than law authorities - they have a lot fewer resources at their disposal and they therefore need to look for solutions within their closed world.
A week ago I started teaching an SIT course in the Bar-Ilan University. After an interesting discussion on the value of innovation, one of the students asked the most basic academic question: “what is your definition of innovation?”
Well … What is my definition of innovation? I suddenly realized that in 10 years of teaching innovation & facilitating innovation processes I have never thought of a definition for the darn thing …
A man walks into a store. He selects a hat priced at $7 and gives the salesman a $10 bill. There is no change in the till, so the salesman takes the bill over to the neighbor to break it. He comes back, gives the buyer the hat and $3 change. The next day the neighbor comes in and tells the salesman that the $10 bill he broke is counterfeit. The salesman takes a look at the bill and sees it is indeed a fake. He apologizes and gives the neighbor a new, genuine $10 bill. The question is: how much has the salesman lost in this triple transaction (assuming, for simplicity’s sake, that the price of the hat was equal to its cost)?
Our latest Innovation Community meeting focused on Sustainability and Innovation.
The Israeli Innovation Community brings together, for networking and enrichment, top managers and individuals with an interest in innovation. The meetings are interactive, informal and down to earth, and always include discussions among the participants and with the lecturers.
The recent cancellation of Columbia University’s planned December session of its Executive Education course, “INNOVATION AND MARKETING“, came as no surprise.It is common wisdom in the business world that in times of recession, one must first cut the Training budget and then the Innovation budget.So this course received a double-whammy.
This phenomenon is quite logical. Innovation’s ultimate goal in any organization is to spur growth.In a period when growth is pretty much out of the question, investment in innovation seems capricious.Companies need to become more insular, stop the bleeding, cut the “luxuries” they have become accustomed to in times of plenty, and weather the storm.Not to mention the shareholders breathing down the Board’s neck to show some sort of profit margin, even if it means letting go a few hundred or thousand “salaries” or “headcount” that they will inevitably rehire a few months later once the R-word has passed.
If you were at risk of losing your only source of income you’d probably stretch your creativity to the limit to find ways of preventing this from happening.
