A lofty vision can be a compelling catalyst but organizations are not short of statements about the future and what they ultimately want to become or achieve; what organizations need to do is to truly aspire, organization-wide, not rattle off catchy phrases about mission, vision, and values; next, they need to get down to the business of choosing, discovering, and evolving to establish and prioritize the conditions under which innovation will more likely thrive, and then accelerating, scaling, extending, and mobilizing to deliver repeatedly in such ways that contribute meaningfully to organizational performance.

It is suddenly required but not necessarily as Faraday's law is without any vision

A lofty vision can be a compelling catalyst but organizations are not short of statements about the future and what they ultimately want to become or achieve; what organizations need to do is to truly aspire, organization-wide, not rattle off catchy phrases about mission, vision, and values; next, they need to get down to the business of choosing, discovering, and evolving to establish and prioritize the conditions under which innovation will more likely thrive, and then accelerating, scaling, extending, and mobilizing to deliver repeatedly in such ways that contribute meaningfully to organizational performance.

I don't think that it is neccessary. Therecare so many innovations made without prior vision.

Thank you for your answer

Anjay kumar Mishra , Olivier Serrat , & Mirna Leko-Šimić .

Vision is the fundamental or rather the originating point to innovation cycles. In essence, innovative ideas that come to fruition after 10-20 years as is normal, can be said to have had a strong vision or visionary behind it who was able to see beyond their times and decades ahead ofall competition.

Sandra Obiora ,

yes i agree with you on long term and large budget projects for creativity and innovations. e.g. the innovation in the space science.

thank you for adding your point . further we are working on a project on creativity validation worldwide, we are open for collaborator for china, it would require the translation of the english scale to mandrin and then validation in china. if you are interested and if you feel you can work for a project that may take you some thing from couple of months, please message me separately.

best wishes

Sandeep Savitaprakash Sharma

I would argue there is balance and it depends on how Vision and Innovation are defined.

If we define Vision as an ideal state in the future that the team would like to see being manifested in the world, then Vision is useful because it provides a broad canvas with some constraints. Constraints are required for innovation, like they are required for good poetry.

But if Vision is a picture of the company in the future, then I would say that Vision could get in the way of innovation. Especially if we are talking about business model innovation rather than just product or service innovation.

Blue Ocean Innovation, for example, is business model innovation that creates new markets and changes an industry. If the team is beholden to a restrictive vision about what the company should be, it may stifle its ability to create. This is why Vision is not a specific input in the blue ocean innovation process, it is an output. This output can then be compared to the company Vision to determine if it is congruent or dissonant.

No, i dont think so

Dear Marc-Antoine Cousin ,

Your point is valid, and the way you have put it very convincing, thank you for adding your answer

Not necessary. But vision do help the inventor to innovate to specific dimension

Dear Azmi Umar ,

Yes it does help, it helps in guiding innovation in a particular direction. that makes it very important. isnt it. ?

best regards

It very much depends on context. To begin with, there is scale. What is considered innovative is very much a matter of perspective, so the precise way in which that innovation might 'happen' - the how - is different.

The first question then, is 'where' is the innovation of interest - individuals, groups, organisations, networks, nations or world? The importance and role of 'vision' differs accordingly (e.g. whose vision are we talking about at these scales and what might that 'vision' do). This question of level, or perspective, also broadly goes to the matter of the 'radicalness' of the innovation - for instance, firm innovation may not even be an innovation at the level of industry , let alone at the level of industry or world.

Another issue is 'when' vision might important - this relates to the process view of innovation, which also varies according to the context. At its most general, innovation describes processes of creation/invention and implementation/exploitation. From this process perspective, the importance of 'vision' and the type of 'vision' will also vary. For instance, if you are talking about the creation/invention, perhaps creativity is more descriptive of the needed 'vision' - in the sense of envisioning of new ways of doing things. However, in implementation/exploitation, the needed 'vision' might be more about planning and leadership - being able to drive strategic or tactical planning for innovation uptake - leading/managing/cajoling others to effect transfer of the new idea (a product of creative vision) to others (people, firms, networks, nations as the case may be). Here, creative vision is perhaps less important than practical vision.

So one might say that the importance of 'vision' and the character of that 'vision' will depend very much on the specific innovation context. In a way then, it might even be said that the innovation situation defines what 'vision' means and the extent to which it matters.

I think innovation needs something like a vision. A vision is not yet a sufficient prerequisite for innovation.

An organisation without a vision is rudderless but vision should be amenable to change such that innovation occurs

Innovation can be vision-driven (how do I achieve my vision?) or empathy-driven (how do I create something that is really useful to somebody?).The holy grail is to balance both aspects. Too much focus on the vision leads to narcissism, bigotry and deluded arrogance, too much focus on empathy leads to complexity, uncommercial value propositions and a lack of focus. In my experience, the art of innovation lies in the walking a narrow path - a knife edge - between vision and empathy.

I agree with @Wilfred, it is good to start with a vision, then forget about it and then come back to it to see if it needs changing. This is in line with modern innovation processes like blue ocean shift, SIT and Google Sprints. This would be my approach.