Innovation thrives in a culture of "intuitively connecting the dots".

In my earlier article on “Corporate Innovation bankruptcy - Blame it on Culture or Abilene Paradox ?”, I have reasoned, that country specific cultural value systems are an important contributor to innovation deficiency in companies and “Abilene paradox” and “Groupthink” add further complexity to this cultural value system. However, it is not easy to distinguish which contributory factor amongst the three, influences the most to this corporate innovation bankruptcy. I had also left a thought in the mind of the reader that - Although the search for the true reason behind corporate innovation bankruptcy continues, innovation survives through serendipity!

Serendipity by definition – is the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

Now, in this article I aim  to challenge this  thought – Is innovation really an outcome of  serendipity or due to the culture of  “intuitively connecting the dots” and creating those "eureka moments"?

 But if for argument sake, we were to believe that serendipity is the proud parent of innovation, it would mean that every discovery and innovation that has occurred on this earth till date has been by quirk of fate or a happy chance, without the efforts of man.

This argument we know for sure doesn’t hold true. Men through the ages have had “Eureka moments” when an idea or a new concept has suddenly popped up in their minds intuitively. Be it Newton’s laws or the Archimedes’ principle. But would that be treated as a “fortunate stroke of serendipity"?  I don’t think so.

Hollywood released a rom-com (romantic comedy) movie in 2001 by the same name – “Serendipity”1 starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale. Wanting fate to work things out, Sara (Kate Beckinsale) asks Jonathan (John Cusack) to write his name and phone number on a $5 bill, while she writes her name and number on the inside cover of a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera. If they are meant to be together, he will find the book and she will find the $5 bill, and they will find their way back to each other.  This movie plot is not only about serendipity playing its fortuitous way of reuniting the two protagonists at the end,  but also about the power of their individual wills to ensure that their search for each other continues till they meet at the very end. So does this mean that human will is entwined with fate or in other words what a person is intuitively knowing what to do at the right time?

Let us now seek to understand how some of these “Great” companies create and nurture a corporate culture which enables their employees to think intuitively (connecting the dots) thus fostering Innovation and providing such companies with a “competitive edge”.

Society through the ages has never left everything to chance and fate for its survival.  Hence one can safely presume that all innovations are not an outcome of serendipity. However, discovery of new continent such as North and South America in early 15th century by Christopher Columbus and/or Amerigo Vespucci in search of a different route to India, can be termed serendipitous!

Gary P. Pisano, the Harry E. Figgie Professor for Business Administration at Harvard Business School in his article– “You need an Innovation Strategy”2, published in the HBR of June 2015, clearly articulates that it is hard to build and maintain the capacity to innovate and the reasons go deeper than the commonly cited cause: a failure to execute. According to him the problem with innovation improvement efforts is rooted in the lack of an innovation strategy. He further states that ultimately without an innovation strategy, these innovation improvement efforts of a company can easily become a set of “best practices” only.

Innovation remains a frustrating pursuit. Failure rates are high and even successful companies can’t sustain their performance. The root cause is that companies fall into the trap of adopting whatever best practices are in vogue or aping the exemplar innovator of the moment.

But, every time a new kid on the block (new entrepreneur) comes into the corporate scene, there is hope for innovation to survive. The growing population of such entrepreneurs today are taking concrete steps to ensure that innovation continues in one form or the other. Some of these entrepreneurial ventures have become great companies today and are immortalized by the many Management Gurus in their books.

Jim Collins in his seminal book “Good to Great” written during the turn of this Century, propounded the “Hedgehog concept” which he claimed was one of the guiding principles for the set of companies which they had studied as those, which were consistently outperforming their competition and the market in the last 25 years prior to 2000.

The " Hedgehog concept"3 is crystallized out of the synthesis of the three underlying principles i.e  1.) What can you be the best at, in the World ; 2.)  What drives your Economic engine and 3.) What you are deeply passionate about.

 If a company were to answer these three basic questions truthfully, they would be able to derive the Innovation strategy which is aligned to their Business strategy.

If you were to delve deeper into these three principles, mentioned above, then usually companies will speak about their culture and passion for creating   innovation, which in turn acts as a key driver to their economic engine. 

Authors William C Taylor and Polly LaBarre in their well-known book – “Mavericks at Work”4 have provided examples of those companies who have stayed ahead of their competition by adopting innovation as a key cornerstone of their competitive strategy.  

They have suggested some strategies to bringing in innovative ideas, products, processes into the companies who are serious about making innovation as one of their key drivers to success.

One strategy is to be more open minded about how the company looks out and listens to the outside world for innovative ideas and processes.  The authors have provided an example as to how P&G created a program called Connect + Develop (C&D) by turning their R&D Scientists into “technology entrepreneurs”. The program selected 60 scientists from P&G Labs to move out into other countries world-wide and engage with Government and university labs, scientists, researchers, and by walking the Trade shows, constantly be in search of innovations outside the walls of the company’s labs, which P&G could bring in-house to create new products or improve existing ones.

A second strategy is to become a magnet for outside ideas – to create and dominate a “deal flow” for innovation in the same way that venture capitalists cultivate a deal flow of worthwhile business plans. So Larry Huston – Vice President of Innovation at P&G, is a tireless champion of the company “NineSigma” which is a fast growing outfit based out of Cleveland, USA, which has developed a “Managed Exchange” –an internet based global network through which companies can call  for help to researchers worldwide, any one of whom can be hired to deliver a solution.  Think of NineSigma as a world-wide search engine for R&D – human powered Google searching out good ideas.

Both the above mentioned strategies are possible only where the innate ability of such companies to allow their employees to do and think out of the box with complete freedom, allowing for mistakes to happen and learning, helps innovation grow within such companies. Hence in an open environment, nurturing innovative thoughts, people in the organisation tend to build intuitive thought processes that through the above mentioned strategies,  tend to automatically  help in "connecting the dots" leading to innovation. 

The simplicity of the solution is innovation in itself.

Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston and Erik Roth in their McKinsey Quarterly article – "The eight essentials of innovation”5, have proposed an eight pillar Operating system for creating and sustaining innovation within a company. One of the eight pillars is “Mobilize”. How do leading companies stimulate, encourage, support and reward innovative behaviour and thinking among it’s people? The best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibres of their culture, from the core to the periphery. This pillar deals with mobilisation of the right people attributes and culture within the company, which sustains and nurtures innovation in the Company.

This intuitive process occurs in those companies which usually have created a culture within its ranks that is steeped in experimentation, fun, team work, collaboration and where making mistakes is not penalized.

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, the computer-book publisher and host of the annual O'Reilly Open-source convention, argues that sustained innovation is no longer just about who has the most gifted scientists or the best-equipped labs. It's about who has the most compelling "architecture of participation". Which organizations make it fun, interesting and rewarding for far-flung engineers and pro-am enthusiasts (amateurs who work to professional standards) to contribute an idea or solve a problem?

However, the reader should not misconstrue that an open and a boundary less culture in an organisation is the best petri dish for creating innovative ideas/ processes. Sophisticated innovators have long recognized that constraints spur and guide innovation. Attempting to innovate without boundaries overwhelms people with options and ignores established practices, such as agile programming or crowdsourcing that have been shown to enhance innovation.

Donald Sull a Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan college of Management  in his  article – “The simple rules of disciplined innovation”6 published in the McKinsey Quarterly of May 2015,  propounds that without guidelines to structure the interactions, members of a complex organisation or ecosystem struggle to coordinate their innovative ideas.

Hence it must be understood that  an organisation needs to build a culture that will give it’s employees the full freedom to ideate without pressure and yet it has to walk the tight rope to build simple rules to guide the innovators and coordinate their activities to a desired goal within the frame-work of the innovation strategy.

Innovation definitely thrives in a culture of  “intuitively connecting the dots “.

By - Amitabh Pendse

This article is a compilation from various referred sources and the personal view of the author himself. These thoughts are not representation and/or reflection of the views of the Organisation he works in or Linkedin as an organisation.

References :

1. Wikipedia reference on “ Serendipity” the movie.
2. HBR June 2015 – “You need an Innovation Strategy” by Gary P. Pisano.
3. Book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins.
4. Book “Mavericks at Work” by William C Taylor & Polly LaBarre.
5. McKinsey Quarterly April 2015 – “The eight essentials of innovation” by Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston and Erik Roth.
6. McKinsey Quarterly of May 2015 - “The simple rules of disciplined innovation” by Donald Sull.