Innovative leadership needs, seeks and desires a way to envision or describe the organization's innovation strategy. In more ways than this one specific instance, today's leaders resemble their traditional counterparts.

If they can model or otherwise map their innovation strategy, they can better experiment with it, put it to the test, stretch its limits and communicate it to others.

"Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays." - Soren Kierkegaard

Stated another way, strategy is not what changes, it is we who use the strategy to encourage, energize, enlighten, engage, extend and empower ourselves to achieve its ends.

The sole purposes for modeling your innovation strategy are to focus you on, guide you into and reveal the granular yet measurable details of your strategic intentions.

Every innovation strategy must give innovative leaders the means to accomplish three crucial things:

1) Direct all activities

2) Develop all resources

3) Discipline all players

When the innovative leadership team designs their model of an innovation strategy, it should include:

=> A window on historical, internal and external realities;

=> Mechanisms to control and adjust to changes

=> Applications of energy to inspire, relieve and educate;

=> Metrics which expose exchanges, dependencies and transfers;

=> Communications of beliefs, meanings and feelings;

=> Relationships between the observed, measured and assumed;

=> Opportunity "areas" where the strategy can be executed.

"Cast aside those who liken godliness to whimsy and who try to combine their greed for wealth with their desire for a happy afterlife." - Kahlil Gibran

Too many managers declare they have a strategy: "Increase shareholder value!" Unfortunately, their strategies are neither inspiring nor seriously implemented.

In this Age where imagination is the primary driver of competitive advantage, your innovation strategy is only your avenue towards sustainable success.

Innovative leadership performs well only when a model for their innovation strategy is formulated - in a word, innovative excellence is achieved through a model for success.

Copyright 2006, Mustard Seed Investments Inc., All rights reserved.