Lessons from Pixar on innovation

Innovation is the lifeblood of company growth. It’s the lifeblood of overall economic growth. We all want it. It can be very hard to do well, especially at more calcified organizations.

Linda Hill’s TEDx talk on the topic, How to manage for collective creativity, is excellent. She’s an ethnographer and a professor at Harvard Business School. She was one of our inspirations in founding Jhana in 2011. To understand innovation, she studied organizations like Pixar, as well as organizations you wouldn’t think of as “innovative” but still did it well.

Two of my favorite quotes:

“Individuals in innovative organizations…understand that innovation rarely happens unless you have both diversity and conflict.”

“[T]hey began to see the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the young sparks, the people who were closest to the customers, as the source of innovation.”

To innovate, you need lively debate from diverse perspectives and ideas from all levels. And you need someone to orchestrate all this, not dictate.

What can more calcified, less diverse organizations do if they struggle to innovate?

Bring it outside voices. Become less hierarchal with ideas and decisions. Learn rapidly with experiments, not pilots. Let the creative process unfold and iterate. Make sure you have a leader effective at leading in this environment.

Importantly, get executive level support for doing this. It can feel slower and chaotic. That can be true.

But it can lead to much better outcomes. Less “me too”, incremental products. More innovation that can drive companies and economies forward.