To jazz up your ability to innovate, turn to jazz – create a clear guiding structure, establish creative chaos environment within this structure to liberate people and trigger accidental discoveries, and encourage improvisation.

The flexible improvisation-driven model for innovation project management doesn’t discard structure, just as there is a clear structure to good jazz. In innovation, this structure is created through roadmaps, guiding principles, business processes, systems and organizational charts. Strategic planning and road-mapping processes cannot guarantee brilliant flashes of creative insight, but they can prepare minds and increase the odds that such flashes occur in real time. Thus structure, as chords do in jazz, serves as a basis for improvisation, experimentations, discoveries and innovation.