Who wouldn’t support an initiative that could deliver these benefits?

But once leaders scratch beneath the surface, there are a few areas that they explore:

• How innovative is my organisation anyway?
• What can I do to create a more innovative organisation?
• What benefits will it bring?

A challenge is that innovation solutions require commitment, new behaviours and new types of incentives focussing on recognition as opposed to purely financial.

One way of thinking about innovation is by considering the creation of an “ideas factory”. Using this approach leaders can ask themselves:

• How do we encourage people to identify problems and propose solutions?
• How do we encourage people to assess what works from other organisations that have tackled similar problems?
• How many ideas do we evaluate and implement per day/week/month/year?
• How do we promote knowledge sharing?

These questions very quickly lead into new rules, new approaches to risk taking, new approaches to teams and new cultures and values.

To promote the creation of innovative organisations, a variety of stimuli are being used including:

• Using new ways to measure innovation reflecting the “open” knowledge economy as opposed to traditional scientific “industrial” metrics (focussing on numbers of patents etc.);
• Initiatives to regularly release and channel creativity;
• The establishment of new prizes and increased levels of kudos, such as challenge prizes (these have traditionally been used by philanthropic organisations, but are now being used increasingly by governments and other organisations as an innovation culture stimuli and problem solving initiative);
• Integrating these approaches with more well known initiatives to improve quality.

Like most initiatives “innovation” is a land of great promise, however the challenge, as ever, will be in the implementation and individual behaviours that are required to deliver these benefits.