On Creating a culture of innovation and idea generation

Creating a culture in which innovation thrives and ideas are constantly being generated and translated into specific measurable desired results is critical for the ongoing growth and vitality of an enterprise. Every enterprise needs a ready flow of ideas to resolve problems, to create new products and services, to shorten cycle times, to reduce waste, to improve operational efficiencies and generally to stay healthy and competitive.

Creating a culture that fosters idea generation and implementation starts with the acknowledgment of the importance of ideas and by the recognition that everyone is a natural ‘idea generator’ - which probably means abandoning the myth that, creativity is a special gift and few have it, and I'm not one of the few.

Paradoxically, though every senior executive will say that creating ideas is critical, most organizations have many policies, rules and procedures that do the very opposite. The unintended consequence of much of the culture is to stop, block and thwart the generation and development of ideas.

After declaring an intention to create a culture that fosters ideas and encourages their implementation, some structures, practices, rules and disciplines are needed to provide support. The clearer the objectives of the enterprise are communicated, the easier it is for people to see what is stopping or thwarting those intentions. It is important that leaders declare the results they want – what by when. It is also important that some of the desired results be infeasible given past performance, can't be done given current thinking making square fit into round as an example - from the movie Apollo 13 - that is the driver for breakthroughs.

1. A particular culture needs to be in place for employees to respond appropriately and powerfully to demands for infeasible results.
   
2. A culture in which: infeasible future results are recast simply as problems to be solved
3. One that understand the importance of running experiment, and understand the distinction been careless in executing what we know how to do, and failed experiments - with low tolerance for the former and high tolerance for the latter
4. One that not only understand the importance of experimentation nurtures running experiments
   
5. One that values and uses failures and breakdowns as in invitation to invent, generate, discover and create.
   
6. In a culture of innovation everyone knows the importance having milestone – a specific result to be produced by when. One (of many) essential practice is flagging milestones that are in danger or that have been missed, formulating them as problems to be solved and using problem solving tools to invent solutions.
   
7. It is also important that everything that is typically characterized as a problem, complaint or issue is also treated as a problem to be solved.

Having demands for infeasible results makes it easy to see where innovation is needed, where new solutions are needed to fill a ‘missing’, that if left unfilled, the intentions of the enterprise will not be realized.

One model we recommend is forming Ideas Clubs throughout the organization and the organization's network of external relationships - customers, users, suppliers, alliance partners, anyone who can contribute

A network of Ideas Clubs should include the following:

• Local clubs: within a work team, community of practice or function
• Cross functional clubs: within a “project” team all the relevant functions of the organization
• Enterprise-wide clubs: includes representatives from the whole organization to generate ideas that impact the whole organization
• External clubs: to include members from any enterprise, field of expertise or part of the world that can contribute to the problem to be solved
  

The Idea Clubs have particular practices and disciplines inside which they operate. The basic organizing principle is, find a solution quickly and implement it with the minimum delay.