1. Innovation is a key driver of long-run competitiveness in business, and effectiveness in the public sector.
2. Innovation is inherently complex: it requires openness to new ideas, the capability to achieve change, multiple disciplines from within and outside the organisation and investment in the face of uncertain returns.
3. Innovation is a core organisational process that can and should be managed by taking advantage of both ‘strategic, top-down’ and ‘high involvement, bottom-up’ processes.
4. The innovation process involves four broad steps: scan and discovery, selection, development and exploitation. All four steps must work for innovation to be successful.
5. Innovation comes in different forms (e.g., process, product, service, business model), and may be sustaining or disruptive. Each form requires different capabilities and needs to be addressed.
6. It is vital to develop and communicate innovation strategies, which make explicit the desired outcomes from the organisation’s innovation processes.
7. Successful innovation depends upon formal arrangements - structures, policies, processes, systems, and resources - and also crucially on the informal characteristics of the organisation, such as its social networks, organisational culture, and overall leadership.
8. Modern Innovation Technologies intensify innovation; by facilitating wider involvement, collaborative working and rapid experimentation, they reduce uncertainty, enhance selection and shorten innovation cycle times.

Innovation is the process of capturing, developing and successfully exploiting new ideas. “think, play, do” offers a new perspective on this critical organisational process. It emphasises that innovation requires three fundamental, broad actions that can each be intensified with the use of smart technology and enhanced process:

• thinking about options and creating new ideas,
• playing with them to see if they are practical, economical and marketable, and
• doing: implementing the innovation to bring about efficiency and/or growth.

“think, play, do” offers a more contemporary idiom to capture the fact that innovation in the 21^st century increasingly involves an iterative and open process.^[1]