Is there a collective and shared understanding of continuous improvement and innovation throughout your enterprise that everyone is working to apply? Are there clear processes, resources and capabilities in place to ensure that ideas needed to improve and innovate flow easily throughout your company? Continuous process improvement has been an integral part of organisational thinking since the 1960s, yet it is amazing how few organisations take specific and demonstrable action to ensure everyone is involved in this critical business strategy.

As technology speeds change, old processes become redundant faster than ever before. Small step change is not enough to cope, and the need for Innovation becomes critical. Innovation in this sense is that big step change that significantly and sometimes radically improves how you do business. Often called Process Innovation, this now requires more than the standard process improvement and Six Sigma techniques.

The challenge for many organisations is defining what innovation means to them and determining how they become more innovative. To create an innovative organisation requires research, interpretation and the design of your own unique models. Fifty years of research and writing has built up around innovation, and is goes through waves that seem destined to break upon the same old rocks. If you truly want to be more innovative do the research and then do the work - but start with your people, particularly your dissatisfied people.  As Tom Peters says 'the real source of innovation is pissed off people'.

Giving your people the thinking skills and tools that allow then to shift the way they see the world is an absolute precursor to being more innovative. Creative thinking is needed before innovation can develop and creative thinking is needed to overcome the barriers to implementation. Mindwerx' Applied Creativity and Innovation model and toolkit gives people the practical skills and capabilities to undertake their task of continuously and significantly improving the way they work.

Some people have ideas. A few carry them into
the world of action and make them happen.
These are the Innovators.

- Andrew Mercer