Innovation is essential to the sustainability and growth of all organisations. To encourage innovation and meet stakeholder expectations, leaders must build the capabilities of their people, teams and organisations. To that end, ION was established to provide a peer-forum for collaboration and access to professional development opportunities

To create and promote collective wisdom in the innovation arena.

To realise this vision, we offer activities to our members that assist in delivering measurable performance improvements and results.

‘To deliver programs to maximise learning and development opportunities for members by:

• Providing a forum to share ideas and knowledge
• Strengthening business leaders’ understanding of issues surrounding innovation
• Fostering innovation-focused collaboration both nationally and internationally
• Supporting and encouraging research into innovation
• Identifying and promoting best practice and techniques that encourage innovation
• Facilitating the exchange of best practices across non-competing organisational boundaries
• Maximising funding opportunities through sponsorships, grants and program fees

Networks are growing up everywhere. Our focus is specifically on providing services for an emerging group of
Innovation managers and leaders that presently are not served. We aim to deliver them a global-perspective
State-of-the-art perspective on ‘innovation’ in all of its forms. Innovation is generally viewed as an art and
therefore a "high-risk". ION exists to prove that innovation is a prescribable, transferable science.

ION is a not-for-profit organisation working solely for and on behalf of its members.

What is Innovation?

There are almost as many definitions of innovation as there are text books and articles on the subject. To us the simplest way to define innovation is:

"any kind of discontinuous change that creates higher customer value"

What Innovation Is Not

Innovation is not optimization.
(optimization is an activity best done by computers. Innovation requires someone to break out of current thinking).

Innovation is not invention
(patents are by definition inventive, but 97% of them will never generate any profit).

Innovation is not random
(and there are rules and heuristics gleaned from the analysis of 3 million cases to prove it)

Innovation does not have to mean technology
(more often than not the biggest benefits come from business concept changes that have nothing to do with technology).