New Directions For Defense, A Big Ideas Special Event: Innovation Leadership is a Craft, with Peter Denning and Col. Todd Lyons [video]
Authors
Naval Postgraduate School
Denning, Peter J.
Lyons, Todd
Subjects
Advisors
Date of Issue
2016-12
Date
Added 12/12/2016
Publisher
Monterey, California: Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
The Department of Defense and military services have all expressed grave concern over our ability to lead military innovations in the face of increasingly innovative adversaries. Innovativeness will come from individual leadership through all ranks, not from top-down initiatives. Future promotions will give increasing weight to demonstrated innovation leadership. This course defines a framework for innovation leadership, identifies its skill sets, and teaches them. We envision a military in which every service member is an innovation leader. Our current common sense tells us that innovation is hard to achieve (about 4% of innovation projects succeed), requires prodigious effort (90% of the work is in achieving adoption), and takes a long time (often over 10 years). It tells us to focus on creativity to generate new ideas and careful planning to sell and implement our ideas within our fields of action. This story makes innovation leadership seem like hard, unsatisfying work performed by a few genius-hero leaders who were lucky enough to be in the right places a the right times. We offer a new “common sense” grounded in the ideas that innovation is the adoption of a practice within a community and that there are discrete, learnable skills or practices for leading the innovation process. The innovation skill set consists of eight essential practices through which the leader intentionally generates innovations. Innovation leaders become navigators who find paths from the current world state to a new desired state, and mobilizers of networks of many contributors. Innovation leaders foster the conversations in which the requests, promises, offers, declarations, assessments, and assertions that contribute to adoption take place. This leadership is satisfying and rewarding.
Type
Video
Presentation
Presentation
Description
Includes presentation slides
Series/Report No
The Big Idea Exchange (BIX)
Department
Organization
Big Idea Exchange (BIX)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funder
Format
Duration: 43:06. Filesize: 502.7 MB
Citation
Distribution Statement
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.