As we prepare for the Innovation Summit next week please keep in mind the principles outlined the White Paper published by the Innovation Task Force.
1. The culture of innovation is driven from the top. Like most organizational cultures, innovation began with the organization’s leadership. Several different leadership structures existed, but the organizations with innovative cultures invariably reflected a commitment to innovation among its most senior leadership, and organizations that wished to adopt an innovation culture had a leadership team that embraced, advocated for, and supported that change. Attempts to drive innovation from the middle or only one portion of the organization invariably failed, because any innovative action that fell outside the boundaries of the existing culture did not receive the leadership support or resources it needed to get off the ground. The lesson that these organizations learned was that a commitment must be made at the very top in order to create a culture of innovation, and that leadership must drive the cultural change necessary to support and re‐organize the organization for that function.
2. Commit resources to the innovation process. Like all successful business processes, innovation cannot happen without the appropriate resources to support it. Employee schedules included time for engagement in the innovation process, money was allocated in the necessary budgets to allow the process to move forward and to capitalize on the ideas it generated, and management personnel were in place to oversee the process and make sure it ran effectively. Although the process mechanics varied across the different case studies the task force examined, some of the common attributes of a successful process of innovation appeared to be:
Precise strategy. The problem to be addressed by the innovation process was clearly defined. Teams working on the problem knew what risks were acceptable and unacceptable, and how their success would be measured.
Eclectic teams. Who participated in the process was as important as the process itself. Team members were all creative thinkers, usually from different departments in the organization, and brought a variety of experiences and perspectives to the table.
Nimbleness. In the case studies, the objective of innovation was invariably to deliver better products or services to a constituency. In this competitive environment, the processes were designed to move quickly and be highly responsive to the needs of the community being served.
Clear decision points. These successful innovation processes generated a high number of creative ideas. The method for selecting which ideas would be pursued and which would not always was defined up front, was clearly understood by all participants, and did not change as the process moved forward.
3. Understanding the mind of the community. All organizations serve a community in one form or another, and innovative organizations have developed mechanisms that provide a keen understanding of what’s on their community’s mind. In the most successful cases, it went beyond an awareness of a constituent’s needs. These innovation processes were imbued with a true sense of how the constituents thought—what they wanted, what they didn’t want, and how they would react in predictable and unpredictable circumstances. The methods for attaining this understanding varied, but the knowledge, once attained, was used throughout the innovation process to serve as a constant guide for successful decision making.
4. Freedom to experiment and fail. The innovative organizations studied by the task force all viewed failure as a natural and necessary part of the innovation process. Within the boundaries defined above, ideas were given the support they needed to succeed or fail, and when they failed, the focus was on learning from the experience rather than assigning blame. One company’s motto was “fail often to succeed sooner,” and managers encouraged their employees to ask for forgiveness, not permission.