Innovation White Papers

This growing collection of white papers and research documents highlights some of the latest thinking about business innovation, creativity and brainstorming.

Innovation and the Theory of Business
A theory of business is a mental framework that leaders and executives to get work done. The theory of business that is employed during these times of uncertainty and rapid change has =significant influence on every organization’s capacity for change and innovation, reminds Michael Kaufman. (4/30/08)

Book excerpt: The Truth About Innovation
This is an excerpt from a new book by Max McKeown, The Truth of Innovation, which will be published in summer 2008. It shares some of what we have learned about innovation, what it is, how it happens, and how it can be increased. (4/25/08)

Creating the Innovation Culture: Geniuses, Champions, and Leaders
Suppose that an innovation culture doesn’t yet exist in your organization. How can you make it happen? How do organizations develop an innovation culture? Who should be involved in the innovation process? What roles should they play? Those and other questions are answered in this paper from InnovationLabs. (11/21/07)

Vedic Inventive Principles
This white paper by Karthikeyan Iyer of the Innovation Group outlines the Vedic Inventive Principles, a set of aphorisms that can be used for creative problem solving. (11/21/07)

How Collaboration Unleashes Project Team Creativity
This report from Group Systems Corporation describes how an organization can innovate more effectively by enabling collaboration and leveraging the "group intelligence" and creativity of its employees. (5/4/07)

Finding Opportunities for Innovation and Growth
This article by Blair Kingsland of the Spectrum Innovation Group outlines nine ways for a company to be more innovative and find ideas and opportunities for growth. (3/23/07)

The State of Innovation - 2007
OVO Innovation takes a look at the state of innovation at the beginning of 2007. Topics covered include open innovation, beyond product innovation and innovation processes, methodologies and tools. (1/9/07)

Building the Innovation Culture
This paper from InnovationLabs focuses on building an innovative culture by encouraging a distributed network to form inside the organization that takes on much of the innovation work. (6/13/06)

Tools for Discontinuous Innovation
Author Michael Ali provides an overview of discontinuous innovation, including notable successes and failures, and tools and techniques for implementing discontinuous or radical innovation. (5/12/06)

Innovation and Transformation
In this paper from InnovationLabs, the innovation lifecycle model is used visually to explore the dynamics behind innovation: when to innovate, characteristics of the parent and child organizations, and some uses of innovation in transformation. (3/28/06)

Innovative Training in Thinking
A primer on "new integrative thinking," which leaps over the shortcomings of traditional critical thinking. (3/31/06)

Strategic Innovation: The Engine That Drives Business
Advice on how to develop an "innovation engine" that will help to propel your business into the future. (2/10/06)

Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places
This new white paper from Decision Analyst shares their learnings about how to go about putting good, actionable ideas into your pipeline so your entire new product or service development process can work more efficiently. (1/27/06)

Innovation Metrics: Measurement to Insight
This white paper from the Center for Accelerating Innovation provides a good overview of common innovation metrics. (1/6/06)

Innovation Roles: The People You Need for Successful Innovation
In order to innovate successfully, you need the right people, in the right roles, selecting the right ideas to push forward. This white paper from NetCentrics identifies the types of people you need and their characteristics. (12/8/05)

The Care and Framing of Strategic Innovation Challenges
Too often, participants in brainstorming sessions fail to clearly frame the challenge at hand. Dr. Arthur VanGundy, Ph.D. offers a practical method for strategically framing innovation challenges to solve this problem. (9/16/05)

How to Build High-Performance Innovative Teams
Here are seven rules for building innovative teams, from Steven Pierce at Innovation Marketers LLC.(9/1/05)

Innovation: Concept to Cash
A systematic approach to sustainable, repeatable innovation from NetCentrics Corporation. (8/18/05)

What Innovation Is: How Companies Develop Operating Systems for Innovation
Howard Smith, CTO of Computer Sciences Corporation's European Group, and author of the book, Business Process Management: The Third Wave, gives his view of the direction in which innovation is developing, and the significance of modern TRIZ in that future. (6/22/05)

Structured Innovation System Empowered by TRIZ
This white paper from Pretium Consulting Services offers a potential framework for helping to manage the "fuzzy front end" of innovation. (6/1/05)

Organizing for Innovation
This white paper from InnovationPoint looks at six organizational models that support innovation, each with different goals and levels of formality and complexity. (11/9/04)

Don't Start With Creativity Training
Want your company to be more innovative and creative? Then don't start with creativity training, but with a project -- a high-priority business issue that a passionate team can sink its teeth into and learn from. (11/9/04)

A Mass Ideation Process
When Michael S.J. Butterworth participating as a facilitator in a Singapore group brainstorming event that resulted in 450,000+ ideas, he was disappointed that there wasn't a more effective system for filtering them and isolating the best ones for implementation. So he developed his own 4-step iLab process to solve this shortcoming. (11/1/04)

The Need for Facilitated Thinking Environments
No matter where you look, organizations from schools to the largest conglomerates face the same challenge: How can worker performance be improved? It is clear that the winners will be those organizations responsive enough to profit from change by applying innovative thinking often enough, fast enough, and well enough to create competitive advantage. How can we help workers to think more productively? According to Dennis Heindl, the answer is by providing them with Facilitated Thinking Environments. (11/1/04)

Systematic Innovation Using TRIZ
TRIZ problem-solving techniques can serve as a highly effective catalyst for creativity during problem solving and brainstorming processes. (2/2004)

Guidelines for submitting white papers

White papers should be focused on the topics of business innovation, creativity or brainstorming. They should be coherent and neatly formatted. They should not be overtly commercial in content, but rather of an instructional nature.

To submit a white paper, please send an e-mail message with a document in Microsoft Word or PDF format to chuck (at) innovationtools (dot) com.

Site management will review all white papers submitted, and will evaluate each submission to determine if its content is a good fit for InnovationTools. Site management has the final say on which white papers will appear on this site. We will not publish any more than two white papers per organization per year, to ensure that no one "voice" dominates this informational resource.