Someone asked me recently, “How can we bring innovation to our organization?”
The question rubbed me the wrong way, but I wasn’t sure why. I stewed on it for a while and realized that it was because they had been thinking about innovation as a noun rather than a verb, as something you import from without rather than cultivate from within.
There is a difference between innovation and being innovative.
The former is a discrete act, undertaken by individuals: a new app, a better way of doing things, a bright shiny object you can hold up to your shareholders, your board, your employees and say, “look what I brought you.”
The latter is a mindset shared by a group of people that underlies everything they do. It’s a culture that encourages playfulness, experimentation, risk-taking, diversity, and collaboration. Innovation is something you need to hire for, showcase, talk about, steward, and reward as a part of your organizational strategy.
Innovation is also linked to other elements of organization design, like structure, processes, and talent. Being innovative, for example, requires the ability to be more flexible and cross-disciplinary; your org chart, meeting culture, and communication tools need to facilitate that kind of interaction. Being innovative means embracing the inevitable failures that come from taking chances, and learning from them; in order to do that, you have to have trust among your colleagues and ways of sharing what you’ve learned.
Innovation also requires investment in the (considerably less-sexy) realm of infrastructure. Technology-driven innovations in particular require a strong foundation of systems, platforms, networks, software—and their ongoing care and feeding. A digital transformation based on a single infusion of capital faces a bleak future indeed.
Organization design strikes me as an interesting place to start in order to cultivate innovative ways of working… but is it enough?