Innovation does not simply happen of its own accord.
It is instead born out of a corporate culture that allows individuals to challenge what is possible, but also to make mistakes without being afraid of the possible repercussions.
These were the key findings of a keynote panel discussion entitled ‘Creating a Culture of Innovation Through Your People’ at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s annual conference in Manchester this week.
Vance Kearney, vice president of HR for high-tech company Oracle in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, summed the situation up: “Fear is the enemy of innovation. It’s hard to innovate in a tough situation and things like laying people off, for example, creates uncertainty.”
But Samantha Austin-May, head of HR operations and development (International) at astronomical observatory, the European Southern Observatory, put it a different way. “It’s about challenging the status quo and thinking beyond the here and now to create competency in the organisation and allow people to experiment. Some call it failure, but really it’s about learning and moving to the next level of innovation,” she said.
Challenge what is possible
This meant that, if a particular idea or initiative did not turned out as planned or hoped for, a review or post-mortem was useful in order to take stock of the situation and see what had been or could be learned.
But the key to creating an innovative culture was to encourage people to “always challenge what was possible”, while acknowledging that it was difficult for individuals to be innovative on their own. Innovation instead tended to come from “people working together”, Austin-May said.
To be sustainable, however, the concept of innovation had to be engrained within the organisation, its culture and the workforce’s everyday thought processes. It also had to be supported and encouraged by managers who were key to ensuring that employees were – and felt – heard.
One example of an organisation actively trying to support innovation among staff, meanwhile, is telco, BT. Each year, it holds a ‘Customer Challenge Cup’, which is intended to encourage staff to form teams and identify things that could make a difference to their job or to the company.
Each team is provided with a mentor to help them formulate and develop their idea and, ideally, see it through to implementation. The chief executive chooses the winning team and the competition ends with a gala event and awards ceremony.
But these are not the only considerations when trying to foster innovation. The panel came up with a number of other suggestions too:
1. Do not rest on your laurels
For innovation to occur, it is crucial to look ahead because if you stand still and rest on your laurels, you will fall behind. As Jane Marsh, HR director for IBM in the UK and Ireland, put it simply: “You have to make time to think about what’s coming down the line.”
Kearney put it another way. “Complacency is the killer of innovation. The history of technology businesses tells us that those that don’t invest in research and development fall behind. It’s game over – death is assured,” he said.
As a result, the key challenge for organisations was to look not just at today’s performance, but also at their “renewal cycle”. “Organisational health is where innovation comes in. So you create a climate for renewal,” Kearney advised.
Heather Corby, HR director for BT Innovate and Design, pointed out, however, that enabling such a culture of renewal was less about having a command-and-control leadership structure in place and more about enabling and facilitating learning and continual improvement.
2. The importance of good leadership
The crucial role that managers play in developing and supporting a culture of innovation cannot be underestimated. At a basic level, said Oracle’s Kearney: “Good people don’t want to work for bad managers.”
This understanding has been taken up by some banks and taken to its logical conclusion, however. According to IBM’s Marsh, a number are now starting to track branch managers as they move them around, evaluating metrics such as staff attrition rates and including them in performance targets.
But managers – along with HR professionals – also have an important role to play in encouraging diversity in the workforce. “You don’t get innovative thought from a homogeneous environment,” Marsh explained. “Everyone has to feel comfortable in the room and not feel judged on how they look or think and that plays into recruitment strategy. Ideas don’t come out unless people feel relaxed and accepted.”
3. Execution is key
To Oracle’s Kearney: “Innovation looks like unreasonable behaviour” because it’s about “an excess of ambition, a lack of patience, a sense of urgency, strong leadership and vision – that’s what unites people in an organisation when they’re all working behind that”.
As a result, he also made the somewhat controversial point that: “No significant innovation came out of focus groups. I’m not saying that people can’t learn from each other, but the big innovations came from visionaries who were passionate in their belief in the future and I don’t think that comes from surveys or focus groups.”
Nonetheless, Kearney does not believe that, in and of themselves, great ideas are enough. In fact, he cited a number of examples of companies that had innovative ideas, but did not win out.
For instance, it was not Google but DEC (which was bought by Compaq and is now part of Hewlett-Packard) that invented the search engine in the shape of Altavista, while it was Xerox rather than Apple that created the graphical user interface for which the latter was subsequently showered with praise.
What this meant in practice was that recognising the value of and executing on those ideas was the crucial differentiating factor, Kearney said.
4. The small stuff is innovation too
Another thing to bear in mind is that innovation does not always have to be big bang, eye-catching stuff. It can also be done in small steps and in small ways.
The European Southern Observatory’s Austin-May explained: “You can be innovative with things like your processes and how you develop your leaders. It’s not just about the bean bag culture.”
BT’s Corby agreed: “It’s about giving people the opportunity to get the ideas out and to come up with better ways of doing things so it’s about how you unlock that,” she said.
But there were mixed views on how this scenario could be achieved. IBM’s Marsh felt that the role of HR professionals was to act as “provocateurs” and to ask provocative questions. Oracle’s Kearney, on the other hand, believed that: “The best thing that HR can do is to get out of the way” of passionate debate.
As Corby concluded, however: “It’s about how you want people to behave. So HR can get out of the way, but it has to make it clear all the way down the organisation that this approach is acceptable.”
