"None of us is as smart as all of us."

Collaborative Innovation is the systematic organizational process of seizing opportunities for beneficial change. The fundamental process of collaborative innovation is essentially this:

People from all corners of the organization pay attention to certain "windows of opportunity" for innovation. The right people talk about how best to seize those opportunities and innovations with the greatest promise get implemented.

That's it. It is so simple yet it happens so seldom. Strategic plans, hierarchies, silos, attitudes, politics, time constraints, meetings, inertia, and all sorts of other clutter get in the way of the perpetual innovation that will make the organization increasingly successful.

Continual Improvement | Collaborative innovation may occur as an ongoing response to internal opportunities for change—continual improvement. Post war Japan was transformed by Edward Demming's philosophy of continual improvement. Demming was a statistician with a heart for he recognized the fundamental precept of continual improvement—the views of people everywhere in the organization must be valued.

Strategic Innovation | Collaborative innovation may also be used to strategically respond to threats or opportunities in the external environment. Amid rapid, ongoing change, traditional approaches to strategic planning are inherently flawed.

Long term planning assumes that the future is predictable, that current or past events can be relied upon to anticipate future circumstances. The danger of planning is that it puts figurative blinders on the whole organization. People march to the tune of the strategic plan and too often miss the many serendipitous events—the unexpected successes, failures, and incongruities—that offer the greatest potential for innovative success.

In today's operating environments, organizations must grow increasingly nimble, proactive, inventive, inquisitive, and collaborative. It has been said that strategic planning ought to occur about every three to five years. Strategic innovation is not tied to predetermined time frames. It occurs any time the clues and cues in the operating environment alert the leadership of a need for strategic thinking.