What corporate innovation is made of
Much has been written about the importance of corporate innovation. Maintaining an innovative approach not only makes it possible to keep on offering products and services that evolve with time, but it also helps to encourage motivation and good morale in the workplace, as well as the ability to attract the right talent.
But corporate innovation requires a difficult-to-achieve balance. Even companies associated with innovation find it tough to manage and maintain such a balance. And as companies grow, they inexorably tend toward homeostasis, toward balance, toward an ever-increasingly stifling specialization, a kind of progressive sclerosis. Solutions such as isolating innovation in special departments or cells within a company are an attempt to preserve a climate of innovation within bubbles, but they hide the real problem: the majority of a business’ activity takes place outside this bubble, which almost always ends up with such departments restricted to the margins. The idea of “industrializing innovation”, of creating a department to “produce innovation” as if it were like making sausages, simply doesn’t work, because the very nature of applied innovation depends fundamentally on context, on a certain kind of environment. Isolated or deprived of that environment, it simply ends up vanishing into thin air.
So what are the fundamentals that in theory at least, allow companies to remain innovative? The best way to conceptualize this is to think about the required context: we innovate with what we perceive, with what we incorporate into the brain, based on our experiences, through observing others’ experiences, and of course thanks to a large dose of serendipity; from sparks that of course do not come from out of the blue.
Building a climate of innovation can begin with an initial push; it can be created around an idea, from bringing together a series of innovators, from the search for a challenge. But maintaining it demands work, work, and more work. It is something that needs feeding, and that means applying resources to it, both in terms of time and money. Innovation cannot thrive on air, because when taken seriously in a corporate context and then applied it is much, much more than simply inspiration.
What are the practices that can, when well managed, maintain an innovative environment in a company? In my opinion, it’s about taking advantage of stimuli that are increasingly available. If we innovate by feeding our brain with these stimuli, we should also work and apply resources with the goal of maintaining this approach. This means addressing the following questions:
- Information: we have to read constantly; reading has to become part of our professional daily life: and not just reading. Reading to encourage innovation has nothing to do with the way we read, for example, the newspaper.
- We need to read in a focused way, and with the right tools to store anything interesting we find: labeling it and sharing it. So far, no better tool has been found yet to efficiently read than RSS. The use of an RSS reader, along with a series of subscriptions, should be something that companies encourage, and through the social networks if possible. The workforce must have the tools to be able to see what their colleagues are reading, which news items are interesting to them, or that they have set aside, and what areas seem interesting to them, without excluding other sources or subjects that might be thought of as belonging to the private sphere.
- And not just reading: participation, dialogue, discussion, and coming up with new discussion ideas make it easier to take the task in hand as seriously as it deserves. It’s not just a question of some kind of shallow contact with what’s going on, but to retain the incentive to look for something deeper in areas of interest, and that could lead to something bigger.
- Presentations: companies that are looking to maintain an innovation culture need to encourage the workforce to present their ideas, or to invite experts and other influential figures to talk. This means setting aside money, unless you want to end up with people coming into the company simply to sell something. In the right environment, guest speakers can be enormously important when it comes to encouraging innovation, or laying the ground for the seeds of serendipity to sprout. Employees who shine when it comes to promoting ideas that encourage innovation should be invited to attend conferences, and thus contribute to raising awareness in the wider community about the company’s innovative practices.
- Encouraging a blend of internal and external ideas: there is no need for excessive specialization, but neither should discussion be about “everything”. This means reading industry news without losing the wider perspective, outside influences: it’s about lateral or parallel thinking.
- Attitude: open, not based on negotiation. An innovative culture requires people with an innovative mentality. Skeptics can help to keep everybody’s feet on the ground and to see things realistically, but skepticism, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, should not be confused with systematic denial and with protecting the comfort zone at any cost.
- Analysis: the users of our products and services, along with the development of these uses over time can give us clues about the right parameters for future innovation, what Steve Jobs said (and above all because let’s face it, few of us are Steve Jobs) about clients and the way they use our products can be a fantastic source of innovation.
- Using your services or products under the same conditions as your clients do is an approach that can help innovation; it makes you more aware of the need to improve and the areas that need attention. Airline employees not needing to bother checking in can be a nice perk, but it does little to increase awareness of the problems the customer faces.
- Group dynamics and discussion, like the ones used in executive education: it is well known that training, above all when subject to the right methodology, stimulates innovation.
- Incentives and competitiveness: human beings like to be rewarded. An innovative company needs to provide proper incentives to people who come up with good ideas, instead of letting them dilute in the midst of the corporate structure.
This is just a small list of possible activities: innovation can, in reality, drive innovation through the tools required to encourage it. The important thing here is the attitude toward those tools. In practice, the vast majority of companies who try to use these tools end up relegating them to minor discussions or giving them minimal priority, which leads to empty chairs at discussion groups, or to activities where only those with a lot of free time on their hands attend. This is not about free time, but is possibly one of the activities that could most influence the future of the company. In fact, the presence of senior management in these types of activities, and reprimands for those who underestimate them, is what differentiates companies who continue to push for innovation from those that do not.
Innovation is not free, nor is it easy, and it doesn’t come about by accident. You have to work at it. But in the present environment it is surely one of the most important corporate functions and one upon which depends your future.
