Innovation poses two enormous problems for most leaders given the way they are trained to think. First, it’s a time-based form of value. It goes sour like milk. This year’s “must-have” gadget will end up in a landfill next Christmas or at least be overwritten by Version 2.0. Second, innovation only pays in the future for which you presently have no data. As Kierkegaard put it “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

The term “innovation” gets bandied about a lot these days. For organizations to truly benefit from their innovation initiatives, they first must understand what exactly it is—and what it is not.

It has been my humble pleasure to work with a number of outstanding luminaries in judging the MIX’s most recent challenge, the Innovating Innovation Challenge (the first leg of this year’s Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation) . This challenge asked for real-world case studies and bold new ideas that make progress in making innovation a deep-rooted, systematic competence in all types of organizations. Innovators submitted entries in which new strategies helped organizations to harness the innovativeness of the people within, and to better the world around them. The main question was, “How do we make innovation more of a natural act and less of a ‘happy accident?’”

In pursuit of that goal, the MIX received more than 140 entries from a diverse group of thinkers, practitioners and experimenters. I’ve distilled six principles, or truths, about innovation from my time spent judging the challenge. Here they are.

1. Innovation is a concrete thing

Many of the...

As human beings, we are born with a creative impulse—with an innate desire to use our imagination to better the world around us. Yet, all too often, our organizations end up being less innovative than the people within them. The dozens of in-the-trenches innovators who responded to our Innovating Innovation Challenge embody the first assertion—and are working relentlessly and fearlessly to overturn the second.

As an open innovation and collaborative platform, the MIX is able to thrive thanks to the contributions of the most progressive leaders, provocative management thinkers, and in-the-trenches management innovators—indeed, anyone with ideas for making our organizations fit for the 21st century. As we begin a new year, we’d like to recognize the five most popular Hacks, Stories, Videos, and Blog Posts of 2012, based on traffic.

We recently ran an on-line brainstorming session we call “Quick MIX” focused on a topic related to the current Innovating Innovation M-Prize challenge . The question for the Quick MIX was: what is the one thing you’d change to make organizations more innovation-friendly? Last week we ran the first installment with eight provocative recommendations distilled from Quick MIX contributions. Read the second installment here for eight additional ideas.

We recently ran an on-line brainstorming session we call “Quick MIX” focused on a topic related to the current “ Innovating Innovation” M-Prize challenge . The question for the Quick MIX was: what is the one thing you’d change to make organizations more innovation-friendly? Over the course of a few days, MIXers from around the world submitted over 100 answers to this question, many of them receiving lots of praise and tweets from the MIX community. There was so much insight packed into the Quick MIX submissions that we decided to provide a summary of the major takeaways from this exercise, grouped into broad themes (you might recognize these from the Innovating Innovation challenge brief ). Below is our first installment, covering eight broad recommendations on how to make organizations more innovation-friendly. We’ll present another eight in a blog next week.