From Paul Harmon: “Suddenly, Innovation is a very hot term. It recently replaced Agile and Excellence as the buzz word of choice in the business press. A dozen books
have been published on it in the past six months. The June 11, 2007 issue of BusinessWeek included a special section devoted to Innovation and featured a story on its cover that suggested that Six Sigma had undermined Innovation at 3M.”

“BPTrends has run several articles on Innovation, and we are currently running two BPTrends Columns that focus on aspects of Innovation…clearly, we are not talking about a new concept here. Equally clearly, businesses have always tried to be innovative. An entrepreneur creates something new when he/she starts a new business, and a manager is innovative when he introduces a new process. Marketing is innovative when they introduce a unique ad campaign, and New Product Development innovates when they use new technology to create a new product or service.”

“The font of modern management theory, Peter Drucker, published a book titled, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 1993, and dozens of business authors have written about the topic since then. Drucker argued that entrepreneurship required Innovation. Today, most writers suggest that, in a rapidly changing world, all companies need to innovate to survive.”

“A second school derives from the work of Genrich Altshuller, a Russian theorist who has created a systematic or "engineering" approach - called TRIZ - which can be used to examine problems and generate new possibilities. TRIZ is a Russian acronym that means something like the theory of inventive problem solving, and it was originally developed in conjunction with work on patent analysis.”

“The third major use of the term Innovation in conjunction with process change is being driven by Michael Hammer, who has written on the importance of Innovation…(but) Hammer is using Innovation as a synonym for reengineering…(he) seems to suggest that Innovation distinguishes between reengineering and either redesign or improvement. We don't think this is a very reliable guide.”

“Everyone is looking for new ways to get things done. Clearly, if we are going to make
sense out of Innovation we are going to need a continuum. The best source of such a continuum that I've found is provided by Charles A. O'Reilly III and Michael L.Tushman in another HBR article, published in April of 2004, entitled "The Ambidextrous Organization." O'Reilly and Tushman review numerous examples of Innovation and end up proposing the following continuum: