Be like Google: How to create an innovative culture
Sidney Hill, Jr., executive editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/22/2007
Fostering innovation is a high priority for corporate executives. But few executives are satisfied with the financial returns on money allocated to innovation.That’s the conclusion that can be drawn from a recent survey of more than 2,400 senior corporate executives in 58 countries conducted by The Boston Consulting Group.
“We’ve seen this same profile the past several years,” says Jim Andrew, senior partner and managing director of Boston Consulting Group’s innovation practice. “It’s not that companies don’t have enough big ideas. The question is: How do they make money from those ideas? They are failing to make the jump from invention to innovation.”
Companies that consistently turn ideas into cash—Apple, Google, and Toyota are ranked the top three on that scale in the Boston Consulting Group survey—have leadership that believes innovation is critical to the company’s success, “and they can show how innovation supports the overall business strategy,” Andrew says.
Sir Ken Robinson, a world-renowned author and speaker on the topic of innovation, also talked about the role of corporate leadership in fostering innovation during his keynote address at the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) conference in Orlando the first week of October.
Robinson—a native of Liverpool, England, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2003 for his work in advising schools to teach children to be creative—says corporate leaders need to foster innovative cultures, and that is a multi-stage process.
It starts with inspiring individual workers to use their imaginations, which Robinson describes as the most distinctive feature of human intelligence.
“Once you exercise that feature, you can create many possible futures,” he says. “The problem is that in most of society—and in corporate cultures in particular—imagination typically is taken for granted, and often abused and suppressed.”
Once imaginations are sparked, workers can move on to being creative, which Robinson refers to as putting imagination to work, or “coming up with original ideas that have value.”
Defining innovation
Finally, says Robinson, you reach the stage of innovation, or putting new ideas into practice.
Robinson also notes that innovation is not always about developing completely new products or ideas. It can be simply devising new solutions for existing problems, or seeing existing processes in a new light. He offers Wal-Mart and Starbucks as examples of successful companies that have innovated in that fashion.
While he jokes that Starbucks “did invent the six-dollar cup of coffee,” Robinson says its real innovation was creating “a whole new coffee culture.”
As for Wal-Mart, he says, it has never invented a single product, nor did it invent the concept of retailing, but it has been very innovative in its use of business systems and processes.
So how do you make innovation endemic to an organization?
You have to cultivate it, Robinson says, by first recognizing that it starts with individual people. “Managers need to look at each staff member and ask do they have talents that I don’t know about, and how do I bring them out?”
Next, he says, realize that creative thinking works better in groups. “Form and facilitate teams,” he advises. The best teams are ones that can mimic the human mind—which means they are dynamic, diverse, and distinct.
“Make sure to distinguish between committees and teams,” Robinson says. “Committees stifle innovation; teams make it work.”
The dynamic nature of teams also is important. Dynamic teams come together to work on a specific project—convening for a week, a month, a year. But when the job is done, they adjourn and move on to something else.
“People also need time to be creative,” Robinson concludes. “Google [which ranks second on the Boston Consulting list of creative companies] allows people to take 20 percent of their time each week to just think about things,” he says.
A big question for many executives obviously is: How do we find time to nurture all this creativity and innovation giving the time pressures all businesses face?
Andrew, the Boston Consulting partner, asks, “How do you find time not to? If you’re not willing to put in the time and effort, don’t expect to be innovative.” There are no other articles related to this article.
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