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I just read a terrific Business Week article on innovation. There's a lot to it, but the gist is that it's difficult to be innovative if your corporate culture has been process-perfected and short-term oriented to the point of being completely risk averse. One reason this article caught my attention is that we've been discussing this issue a great deal internally (as subject matter for articles), and have written about it as well. In the March issue, for example, the Face to Face column discusses the importance of innovation as part of a customer-centric culture. Executive Editor John Gaffney has spent a great deal of time researching this conundrum recently, so expect to see more coverage. In the meantime, what I wonder is this: Is your corporate culture supportive of innovation? Does it accept failures that you can learn from as a way to move forward? Does it innovate with the customer in mind?