The management of innovation

The Conference Board of Canada's Business Innovation Summit is today and tomorrow and the agenda promises some excellent discussion on encouraging firms to innovate. I am looking forward to learning more about investing in R&D partnerships and how people-centred innovation will drive Canadian productivity. A highlight will be the official release of the Conference Board's study on business innovation, outlined in A globe article yesterday. Key to successful innovation? Manage it properly, study says gives the highlights, including the result that those firms that manage innovation explicitly do better than firms who take a haphazard approach to investing in innovation. This is an important point, and relates well to the instrumental ethos inherent in polytechnic and college applied research programs. Those companies that do this well, such as Tandem Launch as I discussed recently, will prosper. The management of innovation is the innovation of management: instrumentality in an intentional/attentional economy.