Implementing Innovation: an Organization-Wide, Cultural Intervention

Early in the innovation journey, leaders discover that moving an organization toward innovation is a more comprehensive endeavor than the mainstream projects and programs may have handled easily during their career. Innovation requires a number of complimentary elements.
Structural Support
Rosabeth Moss Kanter overviews the typical innovation pyramid structure made up of many teams with differing levels of involvement and support. The base of the pyramid represents the many small teams, with part-time involvement, doing initial reviews and preliminary investigations on many new ideas. The top of the pyramid represents the one or two dedicated teams toiling for a year or more to commercialize the organization’s most promising ideas. Configuring these teams to effectively cooperate is a substantial achievement.
Idea Generation
Leaders look for ways to quickly fill their pyramids with ideas as a way to assure the future of the enterprise. Melanie Haiken highlighted one trend called ‘crowd-casting’, where sizeable organizations create mechanisms to engage large numbers of individuals to deliver promising new ideas to their innovation teams.
Cultural Impact
But here the fundamental difference between innovation and other programs begins to be seen. While looking outside their existing workforce for ideas carries the promise of fresh, “outside the box” insights to help lift an organization to new sustained growth, it can also communicate unintended information to the existing workforce.
Think about how you would feel if your organization decided to go outside the organization to generate new ideas for products and services – to either business schools, expertise communities, or to the public. How would you feel? You might say, "Does our management team think that we're incapable of delivering new ideas and new thoughts? Are they saying that we don't have what it takes to compete in the future? Then why am I required to do the work to implement someone else's idea? I thought people were our organization’s most important asset?" A few might be a little ticked off.
And let's take this thinking a little farther. Do you think an employee who felt this way would do whatever is necessary to bring into reality an idea whose genesis was outside the organization? I don't think so. I think they would do what is required, what is acceptable.
Cultural Interaction
Creating an innovation engine within an existing organization is such a dramatic shift from typical programs and projects because it involves a cultural element; it involves how employees interact around ideas, concepts and each other.
When an employee generates a new idea and tells her boss about the new idea, the boss's reaction is crucial to the future potential of that idea for the organization. If the boss acts dismissively toward the employee, if they discount the potential of the idea, or if they disrespect the person offering the idea, then it will extremely challenging to generate the positive climate necessary to nurture new ideas.
Petri-Style Nourishment
Organizations need to see themselves as Petri dishes, supportive entities where new ideas should easily grow into something visible. The growth medium equivalent within our organizations is the observable interaction between individuals and between departments – the positive culture Kanter sees as essential. We need to change the pH level of our organizations’ cultures. Many organizations are so risk averse and so toxic to new ideas that they never grow to a size where their potential is visible.
Interaction Management
Organizations need to be able to bring direct accountability to the observable reactions of managers to ideas. They need to drive observable co-operation between business units.
Much of our organization’s research in the last number of years has been in the area of knowledge work. Knowledge work is fundamentally different than transaction and process activities because it is a pattern of activity that eventually produces an outcome. A software engineer designing a new application may work for one or two years before producing an outcome. The effort is a stream of activity with rare, if any, representative transactions to list on a spreadsheet.
Observable Interaction Management
SMG has found tremendous interconnection between knowledge work, this observable pattern of activity that eventually produces an outcome, and the interactions required between employees to enable innovation. The reaction of a boss to a new idea is an observable reaction and never creates a transaction to record on a spreadsheet. Our efforts to bring accountability and alignment to this level of interaction are within the context of executing strategy by bring accountability to daily observable activities. Our experience has shown us that innovation requires an organization to reach down to this level of interaction – either through direct or indirect means.
Top-Level Leadership Required
As a result, innovation will continue to demand outstanding leadership since it requires a very-broad, almost cultural re-alignment not called for when implementing typical projects and programs.