Great points, Jim.
Although I think a few of the corporate honchos are starting to realize the value of ideas and innovation, even fewer of them realize how to nuture and grow those traits within their respective businesses.

Increasing the number of marketable, actionable ideas takes more than a corporate log-line in the annual report. "We will be the most innovative company in our industry" are mere words unless coupled with the strategy on how to make it so.

Philosphers have said for centuries that 'change comes from within.' When dealing with corporate creativity, I say the same holds true. The best ideas (and the passion to execute them) comes from within an organization.

Slapping a new creative quote on the company website won't make the company any more creative than a bumpersticker saying 'my other car is a Porsche' will net you a new sports car -- but giving your employees the tools, incentive, and permission to change the way they think and do business?

Now THERE'S an innovation!

Innovation Inside-Out

Jim,
There has been some very interesting research on the impacts of intellectual capital on innovation. Specifically, Subramaniam & Youndt (2005) studied the impacts of three forms of IC on two forms of innovation. IC can exist as human capital (brilliant individuals), social capital (groups that exchange ideas), and organizational capital (patents and databases of knowledge). Innovation is typically characterized as incremental (improving existing products or services) or radical (creating entirely new products).

Subramaniam & Youndt found that incremental innovation was primarily driven by organizational capital - the historical knowledge-base of the firm building itself up one brick at a time. However, radical innovation was NOT primarily driven by human capital - the brilliant individual was insufficient for creating radical innovations. Instead, the primary driver for radical innovations was social capital - groups of people sharing their ideas, insight, and experiments was more effective that the application of brilliant individuals alone.

They took a very scientific approach to this problem and worked hard to gate out external influences.

Conclusion -- If you want to develop radical innovations you had better invest in social interactions and collaboration first. You can spend the money you have left over hiring Giant Brains.

Roger

Reference:
Subramaniam, M. & Youndt, M. (June 2005). The Influence of intellectual capital on the types of innovative capabilities. Academy of Management Journal, 48(3), 450-463.

Jim: although I feel very strongly that organizations will only succeed through the personal brilliance of the people who comprise them, two issues create the “rub,”: one, individuals are identified by and identify themselves by their job titles and the boxes into which those job titles fit; and two, organizations will never be able to give enough “permission” for individuals to tap their brilliance comfortably and automatically. Organizations, for all of their good words to the contrary, enjoy the ennui of a hierarchy and the paternalism that infuses it. To break out of this paradigm that created such success in the 20th century is so difficult as to be impossible for those whose very identity is aligned with that success…and, in most cases that includes the “leaders.”

And, even when the leaders “give permission” for people in the organization to tap their personal brilliance, that permission is often akin to that of a trainer setting free animals that have been caged all their lives. Set free to do what and go where and for what purpose, when the “caged” place has provided direction, food and shelter for all those years? So, giving permission for people to be creative can be done, but it won’t be done with much result unless accompanied by personal, individual work on identity development. (And I don’t see many organizations as doing this or even acknowledging that this is a necessary part of the shift.) People need to rediscover and build confidence around who they are and what they (deep inside, innately) have to offer before they can take on any permission or overcome the lack of permission to be themselves, i.e. innovative. It’s not realistic for organizations to tell their people “go be creative” and have people just go do it.

Yet, some within an organization are looking for more—more opportunity to be themselves, be creative and be appreciated for doing so. According to a recent survey conducted by ExecuNet, the executive job search and recruiting network, more that half of all executives are not satisfied with their current job: of the 454 employed executives who were surveyed, 68% are looking to leave within the next six months. The top two reasons from those looking to make a change: 43% want increased challenge/advancement opportunity and another 12% are seeking a better corporate culture. So, this says that there are people looking to be challenged but have found little or limited support for that…and they are continuing to look.

So, I absolutely agree with you, Jim, that a major answer is within the innovation programs organizations offer; and within those programs, the questions seem to include at least two: how do we get organizations that really want innovation together with individuals who really want to give it; and how do we develop organization cultures that realize (and tackle) the “undoing” that must be done before the creative “doing” can commence?

Janine

Janine,

You correctly bring up environment. The Personally Brilliant associate can 1) influence (using their habit of innovation) the environment they live in to be more conducive to innovation (breaking long standing rules for instance and getting the rule breaking institutionalized over time), or 2) seek a new environment to ply their trade.

I am not sure if trackback is enabled on the Blogjam - but I had some thoughts on this topic at my blog, which I post here as a comment as well.

A minimum requirement for organizations to become truly innovative is to let their innovators connect and network across company boundaries and hierarchies. The problem is that hierarchies, layers of middle management, corporate cultures, and employee procedures are often times standing in the way of innovative people being able to turn organizations into innovative organizations.

New top management teams with a mandate to turn companies into innovative organizations may find that changing cultures in short order may be virtually impossible without braking a lot of glass - like getting rid of many intermediate layers.

Fortunately, and with some of the new web technologies (blogs, wikis, tagging, social networking tools, etc.) companies that want to change fast can do so by creating virtual networks of people that bypass the traditional company boundaries and hierarchies, and where if necessary, new rules of engagement may apply. For fairly large companies where it may take a long time to change adverse innovation cultures and practices, that may be the only way to go - creating a new parallel workplace. Of course, your physical organization could continue to stifle innovation - and you have to keep a watchful eye on that. But the advantage of moving the new rules into a parallel digital workplace is that it's transparent.

Let's qualify something....if you talk of innovation for large manufactures (P&G), then we are generally talking about technology development.

Why not make a distinction between that form of innovation and focus on what innovation means in the service sector or in the marketing and service departments of the big manufacturers.

One is about machinery and technology and the other is about people and ideas, and how we work together.

Service sector innovation is focused on finding better ways for people to work together to achieve results. New ideas are needed in all aspects of our service organizations -- to improve 'what' they deliver and to improve 'how' they organize themselves to deliver their services.

Innovative ideas in the service sector are the responsibility of the individual but I believe it take three factors to happen:

1. Do the individuals have the skills to innovate? Afterall, how many readers of this blog have talked about "brainstorming" without reading Applied Imagination? I think we are very weak at managing ideas in terms of skills to generate ideas, developing them further, judging them (eg is it a good idea or a great idea?) and then communicating them to get buy in. My experience suggests a lot of mediocre ideas arise from staff meetings and other collaborations. When you look at the reason it is often poor use of a technique or tool, not being open to ideas from people who thinking differently to the 'norm', or a lack of discipline to stick to the challenge of the problem at hand.

2. Is the climate open to new ideas? As many people have mentioned, are 'bosses' open to new ideas? Here is a great test for a boss: ask them what they would do when someone comes to them with a bad idea. How they respond will give you a good proxi measure of the openness to new ideas. Do they support the initiative or ridicule the result?

3. Leaders must still define where new ideas are needed. People need a sense of what is missing or what could be improved....my experience is that too many bosses can't give you an answer to: where do we need new ideas?

I view the ability to innovate a bit like playing a sport. While coaching and a good environment are important, at some point you have to ask -- do the players have the skills to play at the level we need?
Skills for innovative thinking can be learned and practiced. Confidence comes with practice too.
That's my take on this issue!

Can innovation be a top down driven corporate initiative? Or, is innovation dependent on the individual within the organization?
That’s the question.

Well, I am trying for 15 years to boost innovation from the bottom up. I’m “the guy at the bottom”. And I work in a worldwide chemical company at the maintenance & enginering department. But I find it allmost impossible to get the low and middle management interested in innovation. I’ve shown them dozens of times that innovation works and pays big cash. But still every time lots of effort from the low and middle management is put in stopping or at least slowing down every attempt of creative thinking and innovation. I even tried to create a virtual platform, specialy for the creative of mind, to swap ideas in our company. And that initiative was smothered even before birth.

It looks like, for some reason, middle and low management are afraight of changes they can’t understand. Or that are so “simple” that they don’t want lower employees to think of them before they do. Or that are so “out of the box” they don’t dare to appove. And the vast amount of rules anf official forms is helping them all the way.

So to my opinion (perhaps only valid for my company) innovation:
- from an individual at the bottom to the top is a utopia.
- from an individual at the bottom to the rest at the bottom is very hard. But possible.
- by “uncontrolled” individuals is what is happening. It’s a fact. But has much too low efficiency because of slowing down actions.
- top down will also drown in the swamp called middle and low management.

The most stupid action at this moment is the following:
We have a laboratory for “present and new product development”. The management of that laboratory made the statement “ In order to get more innovative we have to loose 10% of our present employees and exchange them for new and younger employees”. For your information, the average age is 35. So instead of teaching the present, very capable and relatively young, crew how to be innovative and creating the correct environment for innovation, management “hopes” that, within those 10% new breed, some individuals will be innovative. But without the correct environment even these new inventive individuals won’t get effective.

Top Down or Bottom Up? Well the simple answer is both. Innovation should be viewed as a 'system' where creative, empowered individuals are one component of the system, and organisational strategy and support are another component.

Lack of talent and individual creativity will starve the innovation system of its fuel. Lack of supporting processes and tools will prevent creative ideas turning into tangible results.

Mark

Actually, innovation has to be a top down driven approach.

Every company is full of creative thinkers, but if management does not take the lead by promoting innovation, ensuring an environment of trust and implementing innovative ideas, then the innovative efforts at the lower end of the company will get nowhere.

We've looked at Innovation - and lack thereof - in a number of firms around the world and inevitably, true innovation is a top down driven action.

It is also important to bear in mind the difference between individual innovation and organisational innovation. Very rarely does a single individual's innovation drive a large firm's innovation. Rather it is the collaboration of numerous individuals with varying backgrounds who devise and implement ideas.

This can only occur if top management facilitates such collaboration through encouragement as well as tools such as brainstorming sessions, collaborative idea management tools, willingness to risk experimentation, etc.

Needless-to-say, top management also needs to provide budget for innovative ideas which by necessity are riskier than non-innovative ideas - although the rewards are also potentially greater.

Creative ideas can come from anywhere within an organisation. Innovative implementations require the lead of top management.

Jeffrey Baumgartner

The problem with this question is that it holds an "either-or" premise, many have taken for granted. After over 15 years, designing and implementing innovation initiatives in organizations, my conclusion is that the answer to Jim's question is both AND neither!

To start, within an organizational context, the line between top-down interventions versus bottom-up is unclear, at best. Is giving employees tools, incentives, and permission to change a bottom-up strategy (as "Don the Idea Guy" suggests) or is it not a top-down initiative? Who approved the resources for tools, training, and incentives in the first place?

Second, either of these postures, as a stand-alone, will not necessarily promote innovation. I've seen creative individuals buried by a bureaucracy and I've seen "company wide" initiatives miss the point of empowering and engaging their employees.

Third, there are visible as well as "invisible" elements that come into play when promoting creativity and innovation (which, by the way, are not the same thing. But that's topic for another discussion). When focusing on individuals, key elements include knowledge of the tools and skills regarding creative thought (visible) and the attitude to use these tools (invisible). When focusing on the organization as a whole, key elements include organizational structure, processes, and incentive mechanisms (visible), as well as company values and leadership philosophy (invisible). The point is that all of these elements are inter-related, intertwined, and interdependent. Top-down or bottom-up is actually a misnomer.

Finally, just as mal-practice prone doctors do not invalidate the science of medicine, mal-practice in organizational change initiatives (and believe me, there’s tons of examples) does not invalidate organizational development, innovation, or systems theory.

If you are seriously pursuing innovation as a competitive edge in your organization, you better take a holistic approach, look at all of the elements of your organizational system, including the individuals that put it together, and address these elements with a cohesive decisional framework to assure that what is done in one place build upon what is done in the other. PLUS, you have to allow space and time to dynamically combine the proactive decisions and actions you take with the emerging adaptive responses people will evoke, give the ambiguity and uncertainty the future. It’s like dancing a waltz, where sometimes it’s not clear if you are leading or following!

As with most, if not all, either-or questions, the solution is found outside the implied dilemma! Hey, isn’t that what creativity is all about?