Practical Advice For Radical Innovation

I have been talking to half-a-dozen of smart men and women this week who are interested in exploring career opportunities with Idea Couture, one common reason for them is they all feel the need to work in place that inspires them and allow them to push their own limits and grow. They are fascinated with the innovation work that we do and how we incubate these ideas into businesses. I like to think that innovation is sort of a “moment of creation”, "moment of inspiration" or "moment of awakening". The big idea moment is only a spark that drives continuous creativity and collaborative imagination, at the same time applying a healthy and positive dose of business realities. It is only the beginning of lots more hard work.

Many talk about radical innovations, I think any real innovations are radical in nature. There's no need to label some radical. The more radical the innovation the more the uncertainty, the more you need innovation to work out what that technology is for and what new behavior you're hoping to drive. The pay-off to innovation is greatest where the uncertainty is highest and this should be understood.

Web 2.0 causes the distributed capacity for innovation to come alive. The ideas flow back up the pipeline from the consumers and they’re often (if not always) ahead of the producers. It is when web 2.0 and other emerging technologies combines with passionate users who are knowledgeable - they’ve got the incentive to innovate and create micro-cultures tied together by new connectivity. Large organizations naturally struggle with any kind of radical innovation for many reasons. Look back at history of business and we know how hard its even for once great companies such as Kodak, Polaroid, Xerox and even Yahoo to reinvent themselves. For any large scale change, you need to create a "burning platform" and ask people to reason to act. One way (may be the only way) to get people to accept and act; NOT to give them any choice. Leadership becomes critical and people need to know the leaders have made up their mind and committed.

Leadership is about intellectual capacity, guts and judgment. Leaders sometimes have to make themselves vulnerable. They need to roll up their sleeves and deal with real problems where others can watch you. No leaders can be successful when all they do is hide in the background. Amazing many CEOs work hard to avoid coming to the front and dealing with difficult problems. Leaders need to reach out and energize the people and encourage them to bring their creativity to work. It is kind of Michael Porter meets Richard Florida. When Jack Welch said earlier in his career that corporations have barely begun to tap the intellectual and emotional resources of their employees, he clearly understood his mission.

Here are a few practical advice:
- As a leader, you must believe that individuals have inherent creativity and innovate when they see an opportunity.  Reward people with original ideas and discourage people taking credit of ideas from others. 
- Allocate resources in creating the architecture to enable people to share ideas including making use of informal and external networks.
- Recognize the need for the culture to drive and maintain innovation e.g. a lack of fear, and rewards for experimentation.
- Develop decision structures to enable managers to be innovative. Teach them the art of managing paradoxes and ‘fuzzy logic’ to be able to reconcile conflicting ideas.
- Stress the needs for balance in analytical skills and creativity, possess emotional intelligence and sensitivity to multi-cultural and multi-generational issues, demonstrate persistence in sticking with a goal although with flexibility, and execute on great ideas.

A quick distinction between innovation and creativity. Innovation is a process that uncover new ideas that create new wealth. Creativity is less of a process than a  personal characteristic. People differ greatly in their ability to think creatively. One type of creativity is the spontaneous generation of new ideas (not necessarily always relevant or useful) of which some people are capable. Another kind of creativity is the ability to discern connections and relationships between existing facts or ideas. Some people are creative on their own; others thrive on interaction with others and some require stimuli. Creativity comes in all shapes and sizes.

Comments

[Bart]

Hi Idris,

Very nice post, as usual, though I not entirely agree on everything.

"Large organizations naturally struggle with any kind of radical innovation for many reasons. For any large scale change, you need to create a "burning platform" and ask people to reason to act."

The more I experience large organizations, the more I'm starting to believe that innovators shouldn't burden them with their radical change. In short: large organizations cannot be innovative because of the very reason that made them so big. And unless innovation is your core business, you simply cannot innovate structurally.

So it might be better to start innovation from scratch and incubate the idea until the large organizations adopt the innovation at the time they're grown into marketable ideas (the google/microsoft way of innovating). I feel this has affect on the leadership issue. Imho, effective 'innovation' leaders at big companies should really be able to create a protected space within their own company, in which the company-rules don't apply and innovation is the core-business. These spaces should be seen as a black box, with resources (money, people) as input and ideas/innovations as output. Kind of like an R&D-department on steroids. All that the decision-makers outside the black-box need to do is this: allocate a budget (gambling money), pick multi-disciplinary innovation evangelists to live in the innovation-space, let them go and have trust.

"Creativity is less of a process than a personal characteristic."

I feel creativity is neither a process, nor a personal characteristic, that is more present with designer, musicians or artists. Rather, I think about it as a state one can reach, comparable to a state of flow. This is exactly why good methodical approaches to innovation (read: reaching that creative state) and creative environments (like you mentioned before when talking about innovative culture) work.

[Sam Anderson]

Hi Idris
I wonder how you find time to write your posts as they are not only insightful and practical. People don't write posts as long as yours and they are almost like a Harvard Business Review article but more relevant. It will take someone like me 3-4 days to write one that long.

My opinion on creativity is it is more of a personal characteristics and people acquired the early in their life. Creative environment helps bring our those creativity, but you've got to have it in the first place.

[Jim Rait]

After 40 years in industry I have only met one person who when given the opportunity could not be 'creative'. We are limiting ourselves and our organisations if we don't allow people to bloom creatively; I have searched around for definitions that are inspiring, not the common ones we use (often derived in those very efficient places we are trying to change). here they are:
Innovation is something that changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way or the world in which the customer experiences things. That’s innovation” (from Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts.
“Nothing defines creativity better than the ability to defeat habit by originality. Creativity can also be defined as the capacity to put ideas and information together in unprecedented, unusual, unpredictable ways.” - Stephen Bayley
Design and the process of designing, the creative process, is ‘tool’ for analysis, synthesis and reconstruction of the world. It allows us to distil the important components from a multi-dimensional image of reality and recompose them in a new way. - Janice KirkPatrick

I find people in general and so-called non-creatives go AHA! I can relate to these... let's give it a go!

[Alan Johnson]

I am in full agreement and I thin most people can be creative to some extent. Some are more than the others. In our firm of 150+ people, more than 90% are creative people in nature. So there's still the other 10%. Great post. Thank you.

[Bilal Jaffery]

I work at IBM and I can honestly say that IBM has also realized the value that Web 2.0 brings forth to the enterprise environment -- in terms of creativity and out of box thinking.

Great post. Very inspriational and practical posts. Just like how someone else mentioned earlier in the comments, you do inspire thought processes and get the creative juices flowing that my Harvard business cases in my management classes at University did not. ;)

[Adam Russell]

i work at Accenture and I (and my team) find that your content very inspiring and actually help out work. We use many of your thinking in our day-to-day work. Like Bilal, they are better than my B-school cases. You are definitely more knowledgeable that the Profs.