Leadership for Innovation

How to Organize Team Creativity and Harvest Ideas

John Adair

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780749454791
• eBook ISBN: 9780749460112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

New ideas and new ways of doing things are one of the main ingredients in sustained business success, but how do you create the right conditions for innovation?

Leadership for Innovation will help you to create an innovative climate that encourages the development of new products and services. Drawing upon real-life examples including Google, Honda and 3M, John Adair sets out practical ways for bringing about change in organizations. As well as identifying the characteristics of an innovative organization, he discusses key topics such as organizing for team creativity; motivating creative people, how to build on ideas and how to be a creative leader and team member.

Leadership for Innovation will help you to inspire your team to go that one step further and generate the kind of ideas that are the foundations of future success.

1

What is Innovation?

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He that will not apply new remedies must accept new evils: for time is the greatest innovator.

Francis Bacon

To innovate means literally to bring in or introduce something new – some new idea, method or device. The novelty may, of course, be more apparent than real, for newness is a relative term. What is new to me may already be familiar to you. But innovation as a wider concept has certain important facets. In particular it combines two major overlapping processes: having new ideas and implementing them.

INVENTION AND INNOVATION

The first part of this equation – having new ideas – is better indicated by such words as ‘creation’ or ‘invention’. It is the subject of a companion book to this one, entitled The Art of Creative Thinking. Because all of us have the mental capacity to synthesize as well as to analyse we can all be taught to be creative at a low level. Rather few people – but still a surprisingly large number – indulge in what might properly be called creative thinking. Yet very few of those will produce ideas, creations or inventions which are hailed as both original and of long-lasting value to society.

Not all such new ideas, however potentially useful to society, are actually developed. For in order for the idea to be realized and put to work the process of innovation has to occur. Creation, invention or discovery focus upon the conception of the idea; innovation covers the whole process whereby the new idea is brought into productive use.

At once you can see that innovation takes us into the realms of organization, money, buildings, management and production, and eventually into society at large. Without this extension into the practical world any new idea will remain just a new idea, lodged in some individual’s brain.

It follows that not all creative individuals are innovators, nor are all innovators invariably creative or inventive as individuals. Inventors, for example, can be notoriously impractical and unbusinesslike. They are sometimes robbed of the fruits of their success by unscrupulous entrepreneurs, who take their ideas to market and pay them no proper reward.

Case study: Google – the world’s most powerful internet search engine

What made Google the fastest growing company in the history of the world? The story began with two creative-thinking computer nerds at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Together they invented a convincing answer to the question that arises in the mind of every internet user: ‘How can I find, in order of importance, the web pages relevant to my present concern?’

A core ingredient of their solution is a program they developed called PageRank, which signals the importance of any given web page by counting the number of other pages linked to it. But the formula they use to ‘score’ the relevance of a given website blends in other criteria as well: how often key words appear on a given page; whether it appears in the page’s title; and so on. Armed with these insights, the innovative partners founded the company in a garage in 1998 and based the name on a misspelling of the word for the number 10100: the googol. Its stated mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible’.

Equally innovative was Google’s business strategy. No money was spent on advertising: being both incredibly useful and free, its promotion took place entirely by word of mouth. Meanwhile, Page and Brin were raking in money through a supremely simple device: the ‘sponsored links’ section on the right of each search page. Every time you click on any of the ‘AdWords’ in that space, you’re taken to the website of the company which has bid for the privilege of ‘owning’ those precise ‘AdWords’; and the company pays Google for each click. The small ads are hugely profitable: in the six months to June 2005 they earned Google some $2.6 billion.

Yet the future of Google – like all companies – depends on creativity and innovation. Google’s philosophy is to give its highly paid staff (its payroll features one of the world’s highest concentrations of computer science PhDs) free rein. Employees are urged to devote 20 per cent of their time to their own pet projects. Hence the development of Google News (a global news engine which searches national and regional news pages and has struck fear into conventional news organizations); Froogle (the shopping service); Google Talk (a new way of making free phone calls over the net that terrifies the telecoms industry); and Google Book Search (a scheme to ‘make the full text of the world’s books searchable by anyone’).

INNOVATION AS INCREMENTAL CHANGE

Innovation is not dependent solely upon new inventions. Existing products and services, organizations and institutions, should also undergo change intended to improve them. In this case change is not a quantum leap forward, but a series of steps – some small, some large – in a desired direction.

Innovation, as the introduction of change in this sense, has the essential characteristic of being gradual. It is concerned with the smaller modifications or alterations in what already exists. This kind of incremental change tends to be of little interest to the creative thinker or inventor, who is seeking a more radical break with past tradition or what is presently available.

From this characteristic flow three important consequences. First, it is much easier to plan for innovation than it is for creation or invention. The latter is highly dependent upon the creative individual, and by its nature cannot be required by a given date or even by any date. That does not mean to say that creativity cannot be encouraged or stimulated by having the right climate or culture in organizations: of course it can. Second, innovation is more positive and less threatening than other forms of change. Third, everyone – managers and staff – can be fully involved in innovation. Let us briefly consider each of three significant characteristics in turn.

THE MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE

‘Observe always that everything is the result of change,’ wrote the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. ‘The universe is change.’ From the earliest days of history men and women have been aware of both change and continuity as the key elements in their experience of life. Indeed, if life is like weaving a pattern on the loom of time, then change and continuity are its warp and weft.

Wise men have always known that you should not ignore change for you cannot stop it happening. ‘We must obey the greatest law of change,’ said Edmund Burke. ‘It is the most powerful law of nature.’ This act of acceptance is the first step towards exercising control over change.

But can you really manage change? Not entirely, it must be admitted. We experience change as something that is happening in the world and as something that is perhaps happening to us personally or to the organization we work for. As creative and innovative individuals, or as members of innovative organizations, we are also sources or agents of change. Waters from our springs or streams feed the sea of change. Change creates change, and so the volume and pace of change – technological, social, political and economic – increases. No wonder some people fear that change will get out of hand.

The Latin word for ‘hand’, incidentally, is manus, and it is the root of our English word ‘manage’. Originally it was applied to handling things in the sense of controlling their movement towards desired ends. Thus a few centuries ago men could talk about managing a warhorse or a ship at sea, or managing a sword in a duel, or managing an army in the field.

It was then applied to managing institutions and businesses. It makes sense to talk about managing money, for money is a thing. But its application to people – in such phrases as ‘man-management’ or ‘the management of people’ – is more problematic. For people are not things. People need to be led and motivated, rather than managed.

When it comes to managing change in an organization the chief executive and senior management team should be able to sense the drift of change, and make sure that their organization is aligned with it. That requires a sense of direction and also considerable powers of leadership in order to keep people moving together along the same path of change.

In some cases, in order to achieve this sense of movement dictated by the tides and winds of change, it is necessary to change people’s attitudes. For it is essential that attitudes are right. If you do not take change by the hand, you can be sure that it will take you by the throat.

While innovation is a natural human activity, in the context of organizational life it should be both intentional and planned as far as possible. If you fail to plan you plan to fail. It stems from a universal acceptance of the fact that an organization which does not confront change, or sees no need to innovate, will stagnate, decay and eventually die. Trees begin to die from the top downwards, and so this sorry process usually stems from the chief executive and those around him or her. Hence, in Chapter 6, we will look searchingly at the leadership of the chief executive in changing organizations.

All innovations, then, are changes, but not all changes are innovations. An innovation is a deliberate and specific introduction of what is new, aimed at accomplishing the goals of the organization more effectively. Innovation of this kind does not happen by accident. It calls for good leadership and management at all levels of the organization.

INNOVATION IS POSITIVE

Major change may come as a challenge to some people, but it comes as a threat to others. The temper of innovation is less threatening, however, simply because it does not introduce itself in the guise of the dramatically different. Initially it is not a complete transformation of the system. Incremental innovation, it is true, may mount up eventually to something much bigger. Indeed, it may reach the point where the pur...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1. What is Innovation?
• 2. The Conditions for Successful Innovation
• 3. Organizing for Team Creativity
• 4. Case Study: The DNA Laboratory
• 5. Case Study: Soichiro Honda – Leader for Innovation
• 6. Real Commitment from the Top
• 7. How to Motivate the Creative Individual
• 8. Team Creativity
• 9. Harvesting Ideas
• 10. Overcoming Resistance to Change
• Conclusion: Leadership for Innovation
• Index