Regenerating Innovation
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Introduction
While business analysts and managerial consultants claim that today's companies have to do more with less, today's employees are left stupefied. One oft-quoted sentiment summing up the general overload that today's employees have to cope with, "The more I do, the behinder I get," is not only apropos, but also hints at the root of the problem: by increasing technology, society has inadvertently created more work for its citizens.
One ubiquitous solution that has been matched in emphasis only by the pressure to downsize has been innovation. Employees should innovate, managers should innovate even whole companies should innovate. But how? And in what ways? Should managers pressure their employees to be more creative, change their division's structure and/or function, or arbitrarily create new products for hypothetical niche markets? Should companies divert entire budgets toward new technologies?
Although many different companies have prepared many different takes on how to innovate, manage innovation, and regenerate innovation, there are certain common keystones that have appeared repetitively. By taking these common-thread ideas and adding to them the wisdom of some of today's prominent corporate creativity moguls, it is possible to posit a normative solution that could help to establish or reestablish an organizational environment that promotes, enables, and rewards creative thinking...