ParisTech Review: Innovation is Sharing Ideas… and Emotions

Excellent interview of Norbet Alter in the January 2013 edition of teh ParisTech Review: Sharing Ideas… and Emotions: Why Innovation Needs Cooperation.

ParisTechReview

It begins with: “Try as you may, innovation can never be reduced to a mere good idea. Innovation is a process, which is played chiefly in the way those who are to implement it can successfully make novelty theirs. Quite often management tends to overlook this process of appropriation, or to consider it only in terms of hindrances and obstacles. How, on the contrary, can the internal resources of organizations be enhanced and mobilized? The answer is straightforward: by developing a culture of cooperation, which allows for some degree of transgression… and also makes way for emotion.”

A few more interesting ideas:
– “Firstly, we tend to confuse invention with innovation. An invention is the act of creating something new. As such, it may be the fruition of a single man’s ingenuity. Innovation, on the other hand, involves disseminating such novelty. It refers to a much broader process that includes social, economic and technological dimensions.”
– Then, a nice analogy quoting someone: “I hate GPS. When driving with a GPS, you don’t look at the landscape, you don’t notice the signs, and given you don’t get lost you don’t get to ask directions to others.”
– Finally, “innovators are always a minority, or at any rate that’s the way they start out, and the more allies you find in an innovative project, the better you bear with being a minority.”

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