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January 18, 2003
Culture of Innovation
Jeremy Zawodny writes about how to destroy a culture of innovation. There's a lot of discussion today about how companies are not innovative, maybe more than there was last decade about how companies were innovative. I suspect in both cases there was/is a lot more talking about theory than practice. But it goes to a question I've been thinking about and reading about recently: how do organizations create a culture of innovation?
We included innovation in our recently-developed UEN shared vision, but how does that go from wishful thinking to reality?
I think most people think they want to work in an innovative environment. Who wants to work for a stagnant lumbering company? Encouraging and embracing innovation requires a carefully-maintained balance of good management, motivated employees, teamwork, collaboration, risk-taking, "thinking outside the box" and other cliches, and a list of other subtle characteristics. And that only prepares an environment where innovation can happen; there is a whole other set of methods and processes and perspectives to enable effective innovation. Creating a culture of innovation is a lot of hard work; that may be the reason that most organizations struggle with consistent, pervasive innovation.
People generally are innovative. People want to improve things around them. Often innovation is thought of as only the big bold new ideas that win fame (and maybe fortune) for the organization and people who worked on them. Those certainly are part of innovation, but the thousands of smaller innovations that come from engaging everyone in innovation are much more important to the success of organization and individuals. Unfortunately, these are the innovations that often are not embraced because they aren't big, bold and exciting.
A culture of pervasive innovation starts with a pervasive attitude of constant improvement. People may be happy, but nobody is satisfied with how things are. Nothing is ever truly finished--only in stages, because in the process of building and using what we create, we are already seeing ways to make it better. The culture, from top down, has to support and encourage and embrace constant questioning, exploration and experimentation.
Posted by pete at January 18, 2003 11:41 AM