Are you using your org goals to channel innovation?

As you can imagine, in my job I ponder innovation a lot.  Innovation is so critical to success in technology and frankly it’s the fun part of what we do.

The tricky bit about innovation and leadership, comes in channeling it toward your business objectives.  When you innovate in ways that make your business better you win.

So often I find that individuals want to innovate to help the business, but lacking proper clues from the business they tend to innovate where they think makes sense.

The concrete suggestion here is to make sure that your organizational goals are not just saying vague things like “increase shareholder value” but instead are giving your innovative workforce clues where to innovate.

In having useful organization goals, you provide pointers on where innovation might be valued.  If you don’t do that, you’ll probably find yourself with a lot of self operating napkins.