McKinsey's Innovation Matters - show us where you see innovation

McKinsey is looking for your photos of local innovations to seed its innovation debate…...feel free to add a copy of anything you submit as a comment to this post.

"Our forthcoming publication What Matters is a collection of short essays by leading thinkers, scholars, and CEOs on big topics: climate change, globalization, health care, sustainability, the credit crisis, innovation, and more. In one of these, author and designer John Thackara writes, "If you want to find solutions that make a difference, the best place to look may be the community center down the street."

We agree that innovation is often best when it comes from small, widely distributed experiments. So we're inviting you to send us digital images of things that represent innovation in your part of the world. We will reproduce a broad sampling of these images in What Matters, as a photo-essay, and make them available online.

Please send your images to us at innovation_matters@mckinsey.com. Tell us what the innovation is in your photograph, and please limit the size of the image to 5 megabytes."

So what?

Its good to see McKinsey attempting to leverage the power of ‘the crowd’ and recognising that a picture is a great way to capture at least some types of innovation. One of the first challenges I often face in a company is to establish what innovation is actually going-on and this is not as straightforward asit may sound.

One techniqiue I have recently tried with success is to get employees across the orgnisation to submit photos and short (2 min) videos of product, service and especially process innovation (most have picture phones so this is not the challenge it used to be). This has proven a great way to get this process started and can reveal a lot of hidden innovation and a more innovative culture than leadership previously imagined.