Innovation culture over Innovative mindset

A lucrative option for an organization could be to build an innovative mindset automatically, among its existing employees and new joiners, without any planned induction program or through some formal teaching method. Does this proposition sound like an utopia? Well to my mind it is not, as it probably could be achieved through creation of an "innovation culture". Though I am not saying that formal teaching is not an effective tool in such cases, but my intention is to highlight the fact that this hardship can be circumvented with minimal effort. The best part of this innovation culture building process is, it is self-sustaining and brings forth an increasing return scenario, where participants learn by themselves and exhibit behaviors that contributes towards reinforcement of the innovation culture. Let us take an example to understand the role of “culture” first. In Indian government office buildings, if one takes the staircases to climb up he/she would most probably notice the red dots painted on the corner of the walls at each turning, these are nothing but the spitting of employees and visitors who are in a habit of chewing “paan” (betel leaf) and don’t care about the aesthetics of these places. This has been the culture for long and people take up these spitting habits in public places without giving a second thought to it. If asked why, they would probably reply “chalta hain” i.e. “it’s the way it is”. The whole environment acts as a motivator for any new visitor to catch this spitting habit. Now take the example of the metro stations in India, millions of people commute in these subway trains each day but not a single such spots (roughly) could be visible. So what makes the same (similar) people to change their actions? Does anybody taught all of them not to do so? Certainly not, the culture of a metro subway plays the trick, it becomes the invisible teacher. Hence the metro culture acts like a magnetic field and induces certain traits on individuals. In this example both the "government office" and "subway station" shows the power of culture that drives people to exhibit traits aligned to the prevailing environment. Similarly a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship could bring the desired changes in people that are needed in current organizations. But how do we build such culture? I would next highlight three key attributes which when fine-tuned could be effective in regulating the culture itself.

The three attributes I am talking about here are “Leadership”, “Routines” and “Values”. All three together constitutes an essential part of the culture of any individual, organization or a nation. Organizations could establish (and regulate) all of them in a desired way through implementing proper strategic guidelines injected at different stages of its journey from inception towards maturity. According to the age and scale of the organization the time lag, for the changes to take effect, may vary. Like in start-ups, changes would take shape rapidly compared to big old multinationals.

Leadership
Recently I was reading one of the blog called “The Magic Pill of World Class Innovation”*, where the author (Kamal Hassan, President and CEO of Innovation 360 Institute) has described “innovation culture” as the magic pill, which constitutes the success factor for companies like Google, Apple, GE, 3M, Nokia, P&G etc. In his blog he gives example of three types of innovation cultures based on leadership styles, namely “Idea market place culture”, “The visionary leader culture” and the “Systemic innovation culture”. The “Idea market place culture” encourages innovation initiatives from bottom up (as in Google and 3M where employees take the initiative and management inspires employees to be innovative), the “The visionary leader culture” takes a top down structure where innovation is primarily driven by top leaders (as in Apple or Microsoft) and lastly “The systematic innovation culture” taking a combined perspective of the previous two (as in GE, P&G or Nokia)

In all companies it is the leadership that decides how they are going to build their innovation landscape and some of them like the ones describe above (which are considered to be the benchmark among innovative companies) are superior in building such culture due to their superior leadership skills. The leadership plays a crucial role in recognizing, facilitating and implementing effective principles and guidelines and sets the direction in which they want to take their organization. Taking the gaming parlance, I could say that the leadership must engage itself until preparing the playing field and its rules (values) and then must refrain from interfering during the actual game or only interfere at times when players break the rules. The players (employees) would automatically choose the game (organization) they want to play and then would adjust to the rules themselves by setting their own routines.

Routines
These are the activities that the employees of an organization develop by repeated practice. These routines provide consistency, accuracy and efficiency to the activities performed. It constitutes the tangible part of the organization culture that people can see and get inspired by. Through these routines the culture of the organization becomes visible to the outside world and they help the new employees to align their habits with the organization culture. Hence I considered it to be the functional part of the culture, i.e. culture at practice. Though essentially it is the employee prerogative to build (adjust) his/her own routines in accordance with the company culture but the Leadership and Values are the two forces that act (intangibly) on this routine building process.

Values
This is the fundamental force that associates company’s culture with its employees. These are the guidelines or unsaid rules that the employees share as the cultural tenets within organizational premises. Some examples of values in innovating companies could be openness to new ideas, tolerance towards failure, celebrating creativity, sharing ideas, judging outcomes rather than people, freedom of speech etc. The values are essentially set at the inception of a company through guidelines (mission, vision) set by the top management or leaders, who themselves then comes under the diction of the prescribed values along with other employees. But through setting interim guidelines these values can be adjusted over time, but it may take some time to establish a shift in value system once organization becomes mature and big.

To conclude I must say that building the right culture is probably the only way to motivate people to achieve an innovative mindset in a sustainable manner. Leadership, routines and values are the parameters that constitute the crux of the organizational culture which can be fine-tuned according to need. The good news is that we only need to concentrate on building the innovative culture and it would then take care of the rest.


*http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/wordpress/2010/08/the-magic-pill-of-world-class-innovation/

How an innovation ecosystem may look like

An ecosystem is a self sustaining system where its member organisms can flourish and grow through a complex process of interdependence among themselves and their surroundings. Similarly an innovation ecosystem could be envisaged as a system which supports the birth and growth of innovative activities in a self sustaining manner. In this context I would like to state some of the components and their interdependence that such an innovation ecosystem is composed of. This model that I am going to present here would provide a partial resemblance of a more complex system that in reality could affect the successful implementation of an innovation paradigm. By saying partial resemblance I would invite addition/deletion of elements to the model as and when suited keeping the basic framework as is. To start with I would divide the system in five fundamental parts; they are “Actors”, “Resources”, “Process”, “Outcome” and “Drivers”. Here “actors” are the entities, which provide the “resources” and support the “processes” for innovation. These actors could be “Government”, “Industry” or “Institutions” (legal, financial, educational). The “resources” we are talking about here are the fundamental ingredients of any innovation cycle; they are “human capital”, “money” and “existing infrastructure” (labs, facilities, transport, IT etc.). Coming to “process” it can be said that these are the activities which are implemented by the “actors” through engaging the “resources”. The important processes pointed here are “networking”, “IP management”, “decentralization of activities”, “coordination between actors”, “spread of innovation awareness” and “addition of supporting infrastructure”. The “outcomes” represent the end results of the entire system in place. For example we could adjudge “new inventions” as one of the end results which is generated by engaging the human capital, money and infrastructure supported by the processes listed above. Here I would like to highlight the quintessential role played by the “drivers” for mobilizing the “resources”. “Resources” are primarily driven by combination of such “drivers” to produce the “outcomes”. For example “new inventions” are influenced directly by drivers such as “motivation”, “competition” and “pride”, whereas “entrepreneurial ventures” are directly affected by drivers like “motivation” and “pride” and indirectly through “competition”. Each “outcome” can further influence a “process” (new invention affects effective IP management), a “driver” (new invention affects competition, increased standard of living affects pride), an “actor” (wealth generation affects Government revenue, new market affects the industry) or another “outcome” itself (new invention affects entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial venture affects employment, societal absorptive capacity affects new market formation).

Let us now discuss about some of the specific elements which may cause ambiguity in explaining the model. First I would mention the role of decentralization and how important a process it could be to spread innovation awareness. Once the infrastructure building are decentralized i.e. the supporting facilities are created or renovated at different parts of the region, automatically a broader section of people start getting curious about the activities (as they see it expand locally) and eventually come to know about the initiatives. Decentralization in turn necessitates stronger networking and coordination between actors. Second, we would see what is meant by societal (knowledge) absorptive capacity, it is the knowledge accumulation among the society as a whole by which they can easily adapt innovative products (technologically advanced) and use them. Hence the “time to get used to” is minimized for innovative products giving rise to new markets (For example, in developed regions like Scandinavia people are more used to technologically advanced products and its frequent up gradation, also there is a huge scope for such absorptive capacity development in developing country like India, opening new market horizons). Third, I would discuss about the role of pride as a driver. Here pride should be understood as an awareness of being part of a group with superior skills (like German pride about their engineering capability or Brazilian pride of being a great footballing nation), which helps in creating a mindset that drives people to have a natural inclination towards the pride factor (in the example “engineering ” for Germans or “football” for Brazilians).

The above figure depicts an overall picture of all the parts and influence individual elements have on others.