ESPRIT Counsellors

In their third ‘Leading Innovations Competition’ of BoozAllenHamilton, The Four Sources of Intelligent Innovation framework came out as one of the winners. See:http://www.leading-innovations.com/lic05-home/lic03

“In the next decade, innovation will supplant cost reduction and mergers and acquisitions as the competitive battleground. Ninety percent of executives recently surveyed by Booz Allen Hamilton say that the introduction of new products and services is crucial to profitable growth. On average, they aim to improve their innovation performance by 30 percent in the next three years.” BAH say.

In my opinion, innovation of some kind is the only “competitive battleground”. And every kind of innovation is linked to people. People have ideas.

Surveyed executives explain that they have “to balance the analytical rigor of the control regime with a softer side encompassing creativity, curiosity, pattern recognition, cultural sensitivity, leadership, agility, and a learning organization”. Each and every softer side aspect, being a capability of people. BoozAllenHamilton call it “intelligent innovation”. Which probably indicates there must be some kind of dumb innovation too.

The four major sources of intelligent innovation are called:

· customer insight (i.e. what it says)

· global networking (i.e. leverage all knowledge available)

· future foresight (i.e. create a picture of the future)

· innovation organization (i.e. unlock innovation potential within the organization)

As a result of exploiting these four sources, a company improved its organic growth rate and operating cash flow by 50 percent.

Is this four sources model really new? Is it really different from what we all know? Is this not common sense? Of course it is.

Yet it seems it doesn’t hurt to remember what many of us seem to have forgotten.