Recurring Themes from Innov8rs LA Day 1

This week I have been at Innov8rs conference in LA. I had the pleasure of hosting day 1 where eight speakers shared their insights into corporate innovation.

During the talks I realised that there were some prominent recurring themes that contribute to the success of innovation within corporations. I’ve hugely simplified some complex theories into my top takeaways, and here they are:

1. Permission from the top is essential to giving innovators the safety and security to work without constant justifications.
2. Innovators need to be able to experiment and that means failing more than succeeding: for every 10 ideas, there may be 1 that takes off.
3. Cross functional teams are essential. These need to have different skill sets and different knowledge sets. Interestingly Janice Fraser at Bionic told us not to look for the high performers. The disrupters are the ones that wouldn’t usually survive in a corporation.
4. Time and freedom. Ideas are a dime a dozen but people need the time to develop them and the freedom to choose what they spend their time on. Many people know that Gmail came out of Google’s 20% policy. Another example that was given was Atlassian’s 24hrs ‘ShipIt’ in which Jira was created.

And my favourite quote of the day was from Diana Kander:

“ You can’t change people, but you can inspire them to change themselves”

Innov8rs have created more than a conference. It’s a tribe of like minded changemakers. More about them here.