How To Address Organizational Culture When It Comes To Open Innovation
Organizational culture is defined as the underlying beliefs, values, and ways of interacting that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization. There are various types of organizational culture, but especially in the face of open innovation in health care, an organization will undoubtedly be tested. Teams must be prepared to effectively communicate, engage and pay attention to behaviors more closely than ever before.
The Mount Sinai Health System combines the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and eight hospital campuses to provide the highest quality healthcare throughout the New York metropolitan area. Through an open innovation model, we provide care that optimizes health to eradicate disease and improve outcomes on a global basis. We do it with a pioneering spirit, forward-thinking leadership, and an engaged, collaborative approach.
In the new model of open innovation, an organization commercializes both its own ideas as well as those from other firms. As Ajit Verghese wrote in “Grilling, Baking, Innovating: The importance of maximizing surface areas to drive growth”:
“Open innovation programs end up being conduits between the internal operations of an organization and the external activities of the marketplace. Open innovation programs allow for partnership and engagement between different types of organizations so that they may exchange or create value together. The act of identifying these organizations requires outreach and sustained activities that provide measured engagement.”
However, it’s not just the exchange of ideas that will be passed through an organization, but also culture. The intersections of different cultures can be the most challenging to manage internally. Cultures can conflict across departments, not just outside of the organization. The lack of communication, alignment, unwillingness to adopt new behaviors and diverse inputs can stifle prototyping and ultimately innovation.
For example, healthcare practitioners may view innovation as clashing with longstanding patient care values, and may, therefore, be less likely to adopt new behaviors and practices. Harvard Business Review’s Joan F. Brett and Margaret M. Luciano believe, “This is why health care leaders need to focus on aligning innovation with existing cultural values and devote more time to explaining how new processes and behaviors will allow employees to better enact their values and deliver high-quality care.” Brett and Luciano assert that there are three steps for engaging health care providers in organizational change:
- Seek to understand why staff thinks innovations or changes do not align with the existing culture and mission.
- Engage employees with data to explain the problem, its urgency, and how to address it.
- Pay attention to the behaviors you reward and tolerate.
One way to design a culture that embraces open innovation is by building a team charged with implementing open innovation. Sometimes giving something a name with designated employees owning it makes it feel real. Mount Sinai Health System has done this by launching Mount Sinai Innovation (MSI). The MSI team fosters a long-term partnership between preeminent organizations and Mount Sinai’s forward-thinking leadership, faculty, and students. Internal departments, as well as external organizations, are matched with MSI to help hone in on nodes of value, activate the right resources to optimize partnership, and form links between different business functions within the organization. Results include surfacing more problems worth solving, spinning out new innovations with a shorter term to market, streamlined communication, exposure to external partnerships and increased revenue opportunities.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” — Peter Drucker
Organizational culture eats strategy for breakfast so don’t leave it unattended. Addressing organizational culture in the face of open innovation can be challenging. It doesn’t stop with forming a team. MSI facilitates activities, events, and programming to keep innovation open and inclusive to all staff. However, once a process is in place to align incentives and the free-flow of ideas, the benefits of adopting open innovation are evident.
To stay connected and learn about upcoming programming, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Mount Sinai Innovation is an open innovation program designed to find solutions to healthcare challenges that have the potential to impact health globally. Solving tomorrow’s healthcare challenges requires today’s preeminent organizations to interface with healthcare systems in ways that they haven’t needed to in the past. Mount Sinai Innovation fosters long-term partnership between preeminent organizations and Mount Sinai’s forward-thinking leadership, faculty, and students. Participating organizations are matched with a navigator, a Connector-In-Residence across the Mount Sinai Health System that helps hone in on nodes of value and activate the right Mount Sinai resources to optimize partnership.
