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The many cultures of innovation

The word “innovation” buzzes around business today. Every startup professes to be innovative, and writers, academics and industry leaders discuss the need for a “culture of innovation” in journals, news outlets, even inflight magazines. With all this new media attention, should those who have a mandate to innovate, worry that the concept has already gone stale?

The real problem is that overuse of the term ‘innovation’ has caused us to forget the meaning. Many companies are simply over-selling merely better inventions.

Innovation or Invention?

What is the difference? Innovation requires a radical new understanding of some basic questions of your craft. When James Dyson’s team designed a new fan, they did not improve the design of the blades: they created a quite new way of moving air without blades at all. Doing so, they overturned our most basic understanding of what constitutes a fan. Until then, fans had developed gradually in the eons since a caveman first wafted cool air with a leaf. Dyson’s bladeless fans are revolutionary.

On the other hand, incremental invention only extends what you already know. You have a lawn mower? And a separate garden vacuum? Put the two together and create a mower-vac. You can’t deny the smart design thinking, but there is no compelling innovation there.

Enjoying Extremism

In the absence of regularly recruiting the most brilliant thinkers, I believe we can effectively train smart people to think more radically.

Taking an idea to the extreme can take you down a new route. How do you improve the efficiency of a fan? What if we built huge blades, taking up the entire ceiling or wall? What if the wall itself became the fan? Or what if the blades shrank to a tiny scale? From there, what if there were no fan blades at all?

The secret here is not to reject the extremes as immediately unworkable. Rather, you use them as a jumping off point for the most remarkable thought process … what if such a thing was possible?

Diversity is strength

Re-imagining basic tenets is easier said than done. However you can take some steps to encourage that elusive “culture of innovation.” Firstly, let’s be a little innovative ourselves and question the attempts to create a corporate culture in the first place. A single, uniform organizational style is hardly transformational. You need a diverse, multiform meeting-place of cultures, where people have quite different backgrounds, biases and conceptual starting-points in life and work. Diversity reflects more than mere political correctness: it delivers a measurable advantage for research and development.

This is why, in Silicon Valley, companies and investors have started to worry about the character of their workforce. Major brands, such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo have found that they are still largely staffed with white male employees. They know this is a weakness. Diversity is not merely pleasing; it is vigorous and strong too.

I will suggest that diversity needs to go further than just gender and race or national background. Building teams from diverse communities of practice helps, too.

The best product manager I ever hired started her career selling photocopiers, moved to technical support and was working in marketing before joining a product design team. Her insights into user needs were often far more telling than those of her computer-science-immersed colleagues.

Divergent Cultures, Shared Values

Variety alone does not suffice. Varied cultures need clear, committed and shared core values which both foster and support innovation. These Values should retain an emphasis on “challenge” – we should always encourage ourselves to always confront the status quo. We should value open and straightforward talk, so that anyone, anywhere in the team can question our strategies, tactics and operations, passionately and respectfully. These values ensure that the diverse opinions we want to hear, actually have a voice.

We also need a culture that moves fast, because innovations often fail - the risk is not only intrinsic to the work but also part of the fun. In business today you should fail quickly. Teams must take responsibility for this, while at the same time supporting the personal and organizational freedom to make mistakes from which we can learn.

Out of the Rut

When you foster new cultures within your organization and support them with committed core values, real benefits emerge. Your teams should be happier, faster-moving but more secure. And whereas before you may have had good ideas from time to time, and continuous progress, you will now open up radically new scenarios. Your diverse team will ask diverging questions: their emerging answers will often escape the well-worn rut of linear advances. Supported by core values, you will find real innovation.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Donald Farmer .