Innovation, defined: ‘It’s everyone’s job to contribute’
As Harvard leadership professor, researcher and author Linda Hill described in her book Collective Genius, innovation is 'a team sport' and its seeds are in setting a stage where everyone can contribute.
In a world where change comes at the speed of light, organizations need to become more innovative than ever to survive and thrive.
At the conclusion of our recent flyover preview of the Collective Genius simulation, which helps to bring to life the findings in Dr. Linda Hill's book, a question arose about how we define innovation, and what, exactly, are innovation skills? The answer is so simple, and yet so important, that we felt compelled to highlight it and share it here.
What is innovation?
Leaders of innovation must create an environment that fosters 3 essential processes, along with a culture that supports a shared purpose and values. The 3 processes are:
- Creative abrasion (generate a marketplace of diverse ideas through discourse and debate),
- Creative agility (test and refine ideas through iterative experimentation), and
- Creative resolution (make integrative decisions that combine even opposing ideas and reconfigure them to produce a solution that is new and useful).
And they must be able to do this again and again.
Cheryl Whaley, a managing partner at Paradox Strategies, put it this way: "We define innovation as anything that's new and useful. What we see in these innovative organizations is that innovation is the purview of the many, not the purview of the few."
When it comes to innovation, she says, "It's everyone's job to contribute. It's a very democratic view of innovation."
In other words, it's not just for your people in research & development, and it's not just in creating new products. Innovation can be anything the organization does that is new and useful – such as a new way of working, cutting costs, or listening to customers.
Watch the 2-minute clip below, or access the full replay and takeaway from our Dec. 5 session.
Jim Perry, Richard Hodge, and Cheryl Whaley share their take on how we define innovation skills, who needs them and why. The answer is simple: Innovation is the result of everyone working together to create something new and useful.
The background
For decades, Dr. Linda Hill, a founding partner of Paradox Strategies (an Advantage thought leader partner) and a professor of leadership at Harvard Business School, has studied some of the world's most innovative organizations – Pixar Animation Studios, Volkswagen, Google, eBay and more – to figure out just how they have been able to be so innovative, so often.
She and her team essentially cracked the code by discovering what all of these innovative organizations had in common and creating a framework to help leaders nurture a similar process in their organizations.
The result of their research was published in the award-winning book Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, published to great acclaim in 2014. Since then, Dr. Hill has continued her research, and she has spoken many times about the new kind of leadership that innovation requires.
That, she explains, is enabling a culture where everyone in the organization is both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem-solving requires.
She studied the creative process at Pixar, a company which became a touchstone for her research as it produced blockbuster after blockbuster over nearly two decades. She discovered a company where virtually everyone was able to contribute to their finished films. For years, Pixar even named them all, including cafeteria cooks and even babies born to employees during production, in the movie credits.
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