NSW LearnScope Blog & Podcast

[image: Bob Aubuchon]

I’ve been reading a couple of articles on Innovation from InnovationLabs which are worth a read.

The first Building the Innovation Culture, looks at an approach to innovation focusing on encouraging a distributed network to form inside the organization that takes on the role of much of the innovation work. Individuals connected to the network generate their own ideas, conduct experiments, log the results, build support, and help transition some of the ideas to formal pilots or direct implementation.

Within the process, and a climate of trust and resiliency, every individual in the network is responsible for five activities: exploring, trying, testing, exchanging and documenting. They explore ideas, try them by building them into experiments, test the results, and then seek to interest others in what they have done through some medium of exchange. Everyone is trying new ideas and testing them. Everyone is documenting what they have done. All of this is happening simultaneously, in parallel. People can add to each other’s work so that over time the various models are shaped up and made more robust.’

The second article - Creating the Innovation Culture: Geniuses, champions and leaders - Morris discusses how an innovation culture comes into being when people throughout the organization actively engage in filling three essential roles:
1. Creative Geniuses who look for insights to develop into ideas, and then into value adding innovations.
2. Innovation Champions who support innovation by helping creative people overcome the obstacles that otherwise inevitably impede their innovation efforts.
3. Innovation Leaders who define our firm’s expectations and policies to favour innovation. It’s up to leaders to ensure that their words and their actions support and enhance innovation efforts and methods, and that at the same time they work diligently to eliminate the many obstacles that otherwise impede or even crush both creativity and innovation.

How supportive of innovation is your organisation? The paper sets some telling measures…
- Do your budgets include a line item like “investment in innovation”? If not, are you sure that innovation is getting any investment at all? If there’s no budget for innovation, then the likelihood that it will happen declines significantly.
- Is there a seed fund to invest in promising new ideas, or a team of people to manage ideas that do not fit inside of the existing business units? Then how will such ideas find support?
- Are business units measured on their innovation performance? Are goals established for the contribution to value growth achieved through innovation? Or do you measure the “contribution to innovation” made by individuals, teams, or departments?

[screengrab from Morris - Creating the Innovation Culture p.20]

In past posts I’ve talked about issues of innovative teachers who exist/survive by hiding behind doors, or indeed teams who hide behind short term external funding and are then extinguishes. Without innovation leaders change and innovation simply won’t gain legs.

‘Innovation leaders are typically, although not exclusively, senior managers who feel a compelling need to bring innovation to their organizations, and who have the authority to make key decisions about both an organization’s strategy and its operations. This puts them in a position to reduce or even eliminate obstacles that inhibit innovation performance. It’s the overlap between commitment and authority that makes the innovation leader’s role unique as well as indispensable.’
They ’set expectations, define priorities, celebrate and reward successes, and deal with failures, and all of these factors can be done in a way that makes innovation easier or more difficult, because each can arranged to favour the status quo or to favour useful and effective change.’

When you’re recruiting for YOUR next employer, select your senior managers with care