Why digital enterprises need to find their own innovation heroes
- Summary:
- Everyone needs a hero and that's true of any organisation that aspires to innovative excellence. Here's why.
[sws_grey_box box_size="690"]SUMMARY - Everyone needs a hero and that's true of any organisation that aspires to innovation excellence. Here's why. [/sws_grey_box]
While Apple grabs the headlines this week with its latest iPhones, it’s worth remembering that not that long ago the idea of the computer company being in the phone business at all was a pipedream.
It’s a thought that intrigues James Gardner, SVP of Product at innovation management tool vendor, Mindjet, who admits:
I'm fascinated with the idea of the iPhone and how Apple, a computer company that had never been in the phone business, could make the iPhone happen. When you think about that, then you do start thinking along the lines of 'innovation heroes', which is what everyone thinks Steve Jobs was.
Everyone needs a hero - and that’s true of any organization that wants to claim genuine leadership in innovation argues Gardner:
What I can tell you from our data is that large organisations where that sort of change happens always have an innovation hero, someone who is so dynamic and influential that they make this stuff a reality. But the interesting thing is it doesn't have much to do with hierarchy. It could be the CEO, but it doesn't have to be.
We observe there are innovation heroes who can get stuff done, and we observe that there is 'everyone else', but what we don't observe from our data is that there's any difference in the quality of ideas between those two groups.
Innovation heroes are seen as such because they get stuff done, not because they're more brilliant than everyone else. We want to build tools that bring down the barriers between innovation heroes and 'everyone else', so that if you have a brilliant idea then it can become a reality.
A recent example of a Mindjet use case is the Innovation Unit of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) which is tackling the problem of overcoming language barriers encountered by refugees. The UNHCR is using MindJet’s cloud-based SpigitEngage platform to crowd-source solutions from people in the field through to those based at headquarters in Geneva. Ideas and suggestions are open to comments and rise up the ranking of possible options with complete transparency, encouraging engagement in tackling issues across the entire organization rather than having a top-down solution imposed.
Innovation insights
Boasting some 6 million users worldwide, Gardner’s observations are based on Mindjet’s accumulated research and data into the activities of organizations that include the likes of Cisco, Pfizer and Citi. As a result of this insight, certain commonalities can be observed and some conclusions drawn about what characterizes the innovative enterprise. Gardner says:
Number one is that there is a pervasive culture of permission, in which people are told 'You may go and do this'. That's something we don't normally see in very hierarchical, command-and-control organisations. Of course, when people are given permission to try things, often those things don't work – and our data suggests that happens in about 50% to 80% of cases.
So an innovative culture also has to be one that accepts high levels of failure, and even celebrates failure as a means to get on to the next idea. In the organisations we look at, those are the most important things.
It turns out that innovation is an extremely social activity: it's not just the ideas, but who's associated with them, who developed them, who advanced them, who champions them. It doesn't have anything to do with one brilliant person dreaming up a lightbulb. There might have been that moment of brilliance, but after that it's a very social activity.
There are also some clear inhibiters to innovation that crop up time and again, he adds:
The bigger and more 'command and control' an organisation is, the harder it is for innovation to exist. Usually, the boss wants more innovation, and frontline people want it too, but then there is the middle layer – middle managers – who are 'goaled' on doing the same thing over and over again. There's no benefit to them in being innovative, because if they are the likelihood is that things will go wrong.
In fact, there are usually systemic rewards for middle managers not innovating – for example, their annual bonus might be related to serving a particular number of customers, so they're always rewarded for doing things the same. The problem is how to fix that: how can it be made more compelling to innovate than simply replicating the same processes over and over again? That's what our tools aim to do.
Another error, observed ironically perhaps from a firm that specializes in delivering software tools to enable innovation, is that some organizations see tools as an end, not a means to an end. Gardner cautions:
Often organizations think 'I must be more innovative' and then simply google 'innovation tools' and buy one. That's the wrong approach. There first needs to be recognition within the organization that innovation is a people problem, not a systems or software problem. Everything is a people problem first.
People problems include establishing a 'permission to innovate' culture, but also putting in place the frameworks that allow people to take time out from their day jobs to develop a new idea – frameworks that say: 'This project failure was not your personal mistake, but simply the result of trying out new ideas'.
Ultimately what Mindjet's products seek to do is not to replace decision-makers, but to encourage conversation and exchange of ideas, says Gardner:
What we're trying to do with our algorithms is steer attention, not make decisions. The advantage of our approach is it uses crowds of people, crowds of brains. If there are thousands of ideas, we look at how we can steer the crowd towards the ones that are most likely to be important. But that's not to say that the others won't get looked at.
Crowds are very good at 'needle in haystack' problems – finding the best idea in a thousand. Crowds are also great at cognition problems: How much do you think this could be worth? What are the business benefits?, and so on. Collaborative tools are all about directing the attention of this 'super animal', the crowd.
A longer in-depth interview with James Gardner can be found at diginomica content partner, UCInsight.