Note: Joyce Wycoff is the last to join the new, improved group-blog version of IdeaFlow. This is her first post.

Greetings Renee, John and Henry ... it is great to join such an illustrious group that I've already learned so much from.  In case you wonder about my background, in my former life I was a financial manager for several companies, large and small.  I credit my awakening to Tom Peters' (where is Waterman anyway?) In Search of Excellence (which, by the way, is still ranked about 5,000 by amazon.com -- much higher than most current business books ... but not as high as our own Henry's great contribution, Open Innovation.) 

Once I discovered, and became somewhat obsessed by, creativity, I started writing about it and ten years ago founded the InnovationNetwork as a place for people to share ideas and experiences ... probably similar motivations to the founding of IdeaFlow.

What I'm thinking about primarily now is the "discipline" of innovation.  It seems to me that we are in a similar position to quality in the early 80s ... lots of talk, not so much walk.  One of the first things we did as part of our work in the InnovationUniversity (in addition to talking folks around to study innovative organizations) was to develop a framework of innovation principles called the InnovationDNA (available for download at www.thinksmart.com).  Our intent then was to help people understand that to do innovation well, you had to do a lot more than just come up with a bunch of ideas ... that there was a significant difference between creativity and innovation.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to map the tools, practices, principles and systems that support innovation into a coherent whole that will help budding innovators know what to do next.  I'd love to hear your ideas about this.