Like most people, I get ideas all the time. In various occasions, mostly at work but often also in the grocery store, while driving etc. I am lucky to work in an enviornment where I see new technologies being developed all the time. Often I start to develop the technology further in my mind, finding new applications and use cases. It's fun, and stimulating, but typically I forget about it by the next day. 

Someone should invent an innovation capturing device, some sort of gadget that would record what you are talking about and seeing... oh, wait... it's called a voice or video recorder and I have it in my phone ;) For some reason its just too easy to forget to record your thoughts.

But that's not the point of this entry. The point is that innovation has become so fashionable that people have forgotten why its hot. It just is. Some time ago I was also pro everything different. "Radical stuff disrupts conventional thinking and ways of working and a bright, colorful future waits for us all." Most recently I've become an advocat for managed and organised innovation process. I don't think that a process kills creativity, but I do think that a process will help the innovation to be implemented and practised. For example - ehem - I recently received an innovation award for a disruptive idea. I can't tell what it is - its a brilliant idea of course ;) - but I criticise the fact that there's no process to take this idea further. It's just words and perhaps some pictures on paper, and remains to be so because no one has time to take it further because everyone's busy doing their own stuff.

If companies and organizations really wanted to promote innovation instead of ideas, they would invest in a team whose sole purpose is to study, prototype and sell the ideas to business development, who in turn then could sell it to production. A simple idea but why so difficult to implement in practise?