There are, quite literally, thousands of books written on the importance of continuous innovation, reinvention and change management. Most resources are designed to help you gain inspiration and prepare you for the act of pure creation.

"The best way to predict the future is to create it." ~ Peter Drucker

Creativity is often defined as the ability to bring into existence something new or different. Creativity is the basis for "disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention." Doing this well requires bold, breakthrough thinking to upset the status quo... even if it is successful.

Leaders in highly innovative companies are comfortable with and committed to ongoing experimentation that leads to "Creative Destruction" because they know that this is where future revenue opportunities and the potential for growth resides.

The idea behind Creative Destruction is to look at your business from a "hot, new NEXT" perspective where you measure innovation and invention by the percentage of sales that come from products or services that didn't even exist 3-5 years ago. Some business, such as high tech, have to "creatively destroy" their businesses every 18-30 months just to stay relevant. This means that some 95% of their revenue today, comes from products that didn't even exist 24 months earlier!

How fast you get rid of aging products/services, and replace them with the NEXT, is the ultimate standard for long term success. The fact is, unless YOU deliver what your customer wants, your fiercest competitor will.

Innovative leaders are those who steer clear of the status quo bias — the tendency to prefer an existing state of affairs to alternative ones. Embracing a mission for change makes it much easier to take risks and make mistakes by controlling the internal reinventing process in 5 key areas: Associating groups of different ideas together to form new ideas... Questioning... Observing... Experimenting... and Networking with others of vastly different backgrounds.

It is important to remember that change is always occurring and that management frequently gets complacent and blindsided to both competition and opportunity when it becomes fixated on maintaining status quo, business as usual thinking.

This function of business success used to be called Research and Development under old management systems — and was frequently delegated to a specific department to go find/develop new products or services.

Today, the most successful companies recognize that every leader, manager and team member is responsible for observing what the customer wants (usually before the customer even knows it) and delivering on those needs — creating hit after hit (think Apple) or engaging the customer with WOW services (Amazon, Starbucks or eBay) that redefine the competitive landscape.

"If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic." ~ Barry Jones

Excellence At This Function Means You Can Say...

• Every person on our leadership team, indeed, every employee is constantly on the lookout for new, novel and better ways to serve our customers...
• We spend a great deal of time, and ample budget, in testing, trying and unleashing new ideas, products and services...
• We have a close ear to the ground and involve our customers early in the product/service development process...
• My company is seen as the leader in innovation and invention in our industry.
• We are experts at "Creative Destruction" and completely reinvent our business every 24-36 months.