Episode 13: The innovation cycle: from creativity to execution
Published on 31 December 2024 • Hosted by Dr Lisa Colledge
The secret to systemic innovation: it’s all about culture
Innovation. It’s a buzzword thrown around in boardrooms, but how many organizations actually achieve sustainable innovation? The kind that creates real, ongoing value for customers? Too often, innovation initiatives fail because they rely on rigid processes or temporary bursts of creativity. But innovation shouldn’t be something you push through a system; it should be something you embed in your culture.
In this episode of Culture by Neurodesign, I discuss how to build a culture of systemic innovation. Here are the highlights:
Creativity vs. innovation: creativity is generating ideas; innovation is a cycle including creativity, but that turns those ideas into tangible value. While creativity is more of a personal trait, innovation is an organizational characteristic that requires diverse skills along the entire innovation cycle of idea generation, evaluation, and execution to completion.
Frameworks for innovation: I highlight two complementary frameworks that are useful to structure discussions about the innovation cycle:
Explore vs. exploit: drawn from cross-disciplinary academic research on search, this framework describes innovation as a balance between exploration (generating ideas) and exploitation (executing ideas to deliver value). Organizations need both modes to thrive.
Lencioni’s Six Working Geniuses: although not the way that Lencioni developed this framework, I find it a natural fit to connects the six working geniuses—Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity—to the innovation cycle. It enables leaders to connect individual stremgths to the innovation cycle, to be alert got gaps in skillsets, and to consider how to enable different geniuses to work together effectively.
The key to innovation: culture. Systemic innovation only happens when you create the right conditions—a balance between cognitive styles, and an inclusive culture that provides the coditions for people with these different styles to collaborate. As former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner said, "Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game."
I’m Dr Lisa Colledge, and I help ambitious leaders build future-ready teams they trust to deliver now and adapt to whatever’s next — driving engagement, performance, and enduring resilience.
Learn more about building Neuro-Inspired Teams that outpace, outperform, and outlast your competition.
