Innovation Culture is another of those thorny innovation issues which will likely engender significant argument in any organisation. The question really boils down to this: is innovation part of everyone's day job, or is it something which should be handled by a central team?

Organisations often believe innovation is about doing big, transformational projects that create new revenue or define entirely new product categories. These are initiatives that are usually described by commentators as "radical" or "breakthrough" innovations. They're typified as being extremely lucrative, assuming one can afford the very substantial risks. In other words, if they succeed, you have an organisation defining hit on your hands, though the chance of this happening is relatively low.

The innovation economy is starting to emerge as a powerful driver of value. It is edging out the knowledge economy that used to be this source of value, and the replacement is happening despite companies best efforts to ignore it. You can see this happening in companies such as, for example, Microsoft and General Motors who are superb knowledge companies, but did little better in the recent global crisis than organisations based on industrial age economics such as agriculture.

Once you've decided you need an innovation programme, one of the things you'll be spending quite a bit of time doing is hiring the people you need to create new stuff.

A Play-2-Win innovation strategy is what you have when you can say - hand on heart - that you will make innovation the centre of all future competitive advantage. This was the strategy that ING followed when it created its Direct product, simultaneously redefining the deposits market in financial services.

On average, an innovation programme will last 18 months before it gets cancelled. Most of the time, this happens because the people involved haven't gotten results quickly enough.

The word "Disruption" is is controversial in business. It is so misinterpreted that any mention of it makes discussions go off the rails immediately.

Failure is unavoidable for innovation teams, and the normal rate can be up to 80%.

Many firms attempt to get innovative without actually defining what they mean when they use the term "innovation". In fact, you'd be surprised at the number of innovation teams I've spoken to who can't articulate what they mean by "innovation". Then, they spend time trying to work out why their efforts seem to be ignored by their managers and stakeholders.

Today, the question on everybody's lips is, what is the significant difference between a hybrid car and a conventional vehicle? They suppose that there has to be some good reason why people are asking themselves whether hybrid cars are worth the cost and checking their wallets and savings accounts to see whether they have enough money to buy a hybrid car.