Systematic Inventive Thinking

The University of Queensland’s Technology and Innovation Management Centre (TIMC) is an international leader in research on technological innovation. The center was established in 1989 as a Centre of Excellence in technology management.  Its goal is to be at the leading edge in research and teaching in technological innovation.

The broad aim of the Centre is to understand and teach the role of innovation in improving business productivity and global competitiveness.  From their website:

“The Centre has two core activities: teaching and research. The TIMC has an active research program. Staff members regularly publish articles in leading international innovation journals, along with a number of books. The Centre also has a number of international research and teaching collaborations, including, most recently, with Imperial College, London, University of Cambridge, Anderson School of Management, UCLA; and the Stockholm School of Economics.

The TIMC also focuses on finding ways to effectively communicate its knowledge to the broader community. The Centre offers post-graduate and undergraduate degree courses, conducts international workshops and seminars, and its staff undertake a variety of consultancies for businesses and government agencies.”

Two of the faculty at TIMC are fellow innovation bloggers, Tim Kastelle and John Steen.  They write The Innovation Leadership Network blog.  From their site:
 

“In this blog we share our ideas about effectively managing the innovation process. We have several core themes that inform the discussions here:”

• Innovation is fundamentally an evolutionary process. We find it useful to think of innovation as consisting of the generic evolutionary steps of variety (idea generation), selection (choosing the best ideas to execute) and replication (getting our ideas to spread).
• Networks are the primary organisational form that we need to manage in the innovation process. The fundamental creative act in innovation is connecting – connect ideas to each other, and ideas to people. Consequently, looking at how ideas travel through networks is central to gaining an understanding of how innovation works.
• The business model is the fundamental tool to use to develop an innovation strategy. Three strategies that are very useful in business model innovation are aggregating, filtering and connecting. In particular, these are three ways to build innovative business models in information-based industries.

Any new academic program considering an innovation curriculum would be wise to embrace these principles.

Thanks, Tim and John, for your contributions.