I hope you’ve asked these questions of lots of people, partly because my answers would be woefully limited and because I don’t think I could muster the energy to answer all of them. Each one could produce a book’s worth of opinion.

With that, let me take a stab at #2. As recently as 30 or 40 years ago, a novel process or product could carry a company for many years. Think of how long Xerox prospered with copying, Polaroid with instant photography, etc.

But today, many things have changed that erode the lifespan of innovations–global communications and the internet make it easy to learn what competitors are doing. Vibrant export economies all over the world and low trade barriers geometrically increase the level of competition in any product or service area. Outsourcing and consulting (This is one of Hamel’s points) spread ingenuity and best practices quickly throughout an industry.

For all those reasons, and probably many more, the ability to come up with rapid, frequent innovations has become far more important and valuable than any single innovation, no matter how revolutionary.

Thanks for reading. I hope this was useful.

Regards, John

I was wondering if you could help me answer a few other questions regarding “INNOVATION”?

In your opinion, what is innovation and how has it changed in the 21st Century?
Why is innovation becoming increasingly important to organizations?
When is innovation used as an intervention?
What about the problem of hyping things as innovations that are not really that innovative and dismissing true innovations because they are not understood?
What are some tips, techniques, and issues for using innovation in the real world?

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated, Caroline Huebner

Here is a link to the index our class is building: http://education.concordia.ca/~scarliner/hptinterventions/.