Most organizations can't innovate. Controlled by "policy", "union contract", "GAAP" or "handbook", practices are fronzen, any changes are treated as problems. Innovation, I concluded, happens at the interaction of stable and chaos, I call "innovation frontier". It is what Victor Huang called "Rainforest", it is what Clayton Christensen called at "disruptive technology". It is an environment that new ideas happened, nurtured, tried, evaluated, quickly and freely. If the new ideas flys, it will move within the frontier and become part of the stable market place, it the new ideas does not fly, it will be quickly killed so the resources: finance, space, talents, can be re-cycled efficiently.
It is why universities is central to any sustaining innovative community, because of its core design, new ideas, new students, are essential. Old ideas, old graduates quickly disappears. Human beings, especially older ones, (sorry, old folks like myself), tend to seek stability over changes, tend to push the organizations toward the stable, or even frigid state, in the hope to keep things as they are. In the effort, innovations are slowed or worse, killed.
How to maintain the "innovation frontier" in an organization or company? Well, wait till my book "The Tao of Innovation"
