Leadership for Innovation

Three Essential Skill Sets for Leading Employee-Driven Innovation

David Masumba

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781642792546
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Knowledge Capital
• Index: Business

Leadership for Innovation takes a look at organizations' desire to make innovation every employee's responsibility and teaches organizational leaders to create an innovative climate.

Studies have revealed that although organizations desire to make innovation every employee`s responsibility, the major challenge is how to create a climate where every employee across functional units is involved in advancing innovation. Employee-driven innovation does not happen naturally, or by relaying on traditional management tools and approaches. Organizational leaders must possess the necessary innovation skills to develop and implement crosscutting innovation-support systems and practices. With over 10 years of experience focusing on designing workforce innovation-support systems, David Masumba shares strategies and policies that help companies create a climate of innovation. Leadership for Innovation offers tools that organizational leaders across industries, individuals aspiring to assume leadership roles, and undergraduate and graduate students can apply to develop essential innovation skill sets and bring themselves or their company to a whole new level.

PART I

INNOVATIVE THINKING SKILLS

Overview

Part I covers the first of the three categories of innovation skill sets essential for leading workforce innovation: innovative thinking skills. This part looks at what the skill set entails and how to translate the skills into instruments of inspiring and leading workforces to develop innovative thinking abilities so that they can contribute to building a culture of innovation across the organization. Part I is structured in three chapters, as follows:

• 
  Chapter 1: Understanding Innovative Thinking Skills
• 
  Chapter 2: Approaches: How Do You Develop Innovative Thinking Skills?
• 
  Chapter 3: Why Is It Important for Organizational Leaders to Have Innovative Thinking Abilities in Leading Workforce Innovation?

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Innovative Thinking Skills

This chapter will cover the following concepts: (1) the definition of innovative thinking skills, (2) the importance of understanding what innovative thinking skills entail, (3) the interpretation and expression of innovative thinking skills, and (4) the expression of innovative thinking skills in the context of support functional units.

1. The Definition of Innovative Thinking Skills

To understand what innovative thinking skills are, it’s important to first define pertinent terms. We begin with the definition of an innovative person. According to literature on innovation, an innovative person is one who possesses abilities and characteristics that drive innovative performance. The next question would then be, What is innovative performance? An understanding of what innovative performance entails is necessary to interpret or understand what innovative thinking skills are. Thus, in order to understand what innovative performance is, it’s important to first establish the meaning of innovation. This book defines innovation as a process that involves the following:

Figure 1-1. Definition of innovation

This definition of innovation forms the basis for interpreting what innovative performance is. You can see that the first and second parts are an expression of innovative performance. Therefore, innovative performance can be defined as an expression of innovative thinking skills and abilities in response to a need or problem in the particular context of an organization’s functional activity. Take a look at the following story.

A senior executive at IBM contributed to building a Life Sciences Unit at the company. Anne Robertson (not her real name) was in charge of a unit she had built from scratch to its current status of more than two thousand employees. Robertson learned that her mother had developed complications during a health treatment when she reacted adversely to a particular medication. Although Anne’s mother’s records were updated to warn doctors not to repeat the treatment, just three days later, another doctor missed that warning and gave her the very same medicine. Robertson was shocked when she found out how common and widespread the problem was in US hospitals. According to reports, more than one hundred thousand people die every year in US hospitals because of medical errors such as incorrect medication, incorrect dosage, inefficient diagnostics, duplicated procedures, operations on the wrong side of the body, and so forth, and the problem has been going on for many years. Robertson started thinking about how IBM could solve the problem in an innovative way or in a way not seen on the market before. Today, IBM’s Life Sciences Unit manufactures and supplies IT systems that are helping hospitals manage their patient data more effectively.

This IBM story illustrates the connection between noticing a problem and generating an innovative idea, which, in essence, is an expression of innovative performance. Having described the meaning of innovation and how it’s linked to the meaning of innovative performance, it’s clear now that the interpretation of innovative thinking skills is based on the meanings of the terms innovation and innovative performance. That being said, innovative thinking skills are defined as a process that involves two aspects:

1. i.The ability to identify problems, needs, and challenges
2. ii.The ability to turn the problems and needs into innovative opportunities by generating innovative ideas or solutions (i.e., solutions not seen on the market before) to fix the identified problems or needs

2. The Importance of Understanding What Innovative Thinking Skills Entail

Why is it important for leaders to understand what innovative thinking skills entail?

1. i.Innovative thinking is now a crosscutting practice in organizations. According to a number of studies, it’s widely believed across industries (e.g., manufacturing, technology, financial, hospitality, health, aviation, auto, retail) that innovation is a predictor of growth and profitability. Thus, in an effort to scale innovation performance across all functional units, many organizations are adopting the practice of making innovation every employee’s business. The introduction to this book cites a 2010 study by the US-based Institute for Corporate Productivity on the topic of innovation in which virtually all 641 respondents representing organizations with a thousand or more employees agreed that innovation had increased in importance across their organizations and further predicted that innovation would become even more important in coming years. In order to scale the practice of innovative thinking across the organization, one vital aspect that the top leadership has to clarify and instill in the hearts and minds of workforces is that innovative thinking is not an area reserved for specific persons or functional units. That is, innovative thinking is a skill that all employees can attain or develop, irrespective of their level in the organizational structure or the functional unit under which they fall. This fact is backed by numerous studies. To instill this message in the hearts and minds of workforces and influence or drive innovative thinking practices across functional units, first and foremost, it is important for organizational leaders to understand what innovative thinking skills entail. Further, the message can be leveraged by leadership as a motivational instrument for rallying the workforces to contribute toward generating diverse innovative ideas and to help build a culture of innovation across all the functional units of the organization.
2. ii.Understanding what innovative thinking entails helps leaders to interpret how innovative thinking skills are expressed. According to the Human Capital Trends—2012 report by Deloitte LLP, many companies are now defining innovation broadly to include such aspects as services, processes, business models, communication, and cost-structure improvements across the enterprise. Similarly, in an article published in the online innovation management magazine InnovationManagement.se, Jean-Philippe Deschamps, a renowned innovation expert and professor at Switzerland’s prestigious IMD management school, observed that one of the key roles of management in governing innovation is to ensure that innovation is defined very broadly across the organization. Thus, understanding innovative thinking skills helps leaders to interpret how innovative thinking skills are applied and expressed across the various components of an organization’s value chain such as research and development, design, manufacturing, sales, marketing, IT, procurement, distribution, HR, finance and accounting.

3. The Interpretation and Expression of Innovative Thinking Skills

This section illustrates how innovative thinking skills can be expressed and interpreted.

Here is an example of how innovative thinking skills can be expressed and interpreted in the context of each of the functional units of DM Personal Care Products, a fictitious company that manufactures a variety of personal care products.

Step 1: Identify core and support functional units of DM Personal Care Products. Let’s assume the company has the following functional units:

Core functional units

• 
  Product-development unit, with the following segments:
  • 
    Body-lotions segment
  • 
    Skin-cleansing segment
  • 
    Hair-care segment
  • 
    Hand-washing segment
• 
  Manufacturing-processes department (the manufacturing-processes department comprises the same segments as the product-development unit)
• 
  Marketing department, with the following units:
  • 
    Pricing unit
  • 
    Product-promotion unit
  • 
    Product-delivery unit
  • 
    New-markets unit
  • 
    Packaging unit
• 
  Customer service department

Support functional units

• 
  Procurement department
• 
  HR department
• 
  Finance and accounting department
• 
  IT department
• 
  Corporate affairs department

Step 2: Create worksheets for interpreting innovative thinking skills in the context of the identified core and support functional units.

Worksheets 1-1 through 1-5 illustrate how to interpret innovative thinking skills in the context of the identified business segments and functional units.

Worksheets 1-1 through 1-4 cover the interpretation of innovative thinking skills for core functional units. Worksheet 1-5, introduced in the following subsection, is for support functional units.

Worksheet 1-1. Interpretation of innovative thinking skills in the product-development functional unit

Product categories and segments

How do you define or express innovative thinking skills in the context of the product-development functional unit?

Body lotions

Innovative thinking skills in the context of the product-development functional unit would be interpreted as the ability to do the following: •Identify problems and needs relative to the product categories and segments of the product-development functional unit •Turn the problems and needs into innovation opportunities by generating new product ideas or solutions (i.e., product solutions not seen on the market before) to fix the identified problems or...