Companies and managers worldwide struggle with a big phenomenon: How do you create innovation? As a corporate leader trying to scale to the next S-curve, finding that new topic that ‘moves the proverbial needle’ is not an easy puzzle to tackle. This is especially true if set structures, hierarchies and silos create distances between the innovators and customers prove to be major issues in idea implementation. Does innovation come from bottom up, business or design school, or does it belong to the C-suite? Do we agree that ‘Innovation is a C-word?’.
Authors from Amsterdam’s THNK – School of Creative Leadership dwelled over this topic in detail. Some of the key questions they asked were:
“What competencies are required? Should our leaders seek out a B-School (business) or a D-School (design)? Is there a C-School, a school where creativity and C-suite leadership blend, a place of learning that accelerates innovation leadership and the creative process in entrepreneurs and corporates, with leaders from the private, public, and social sectors”
The authors argue that, “understanding innovation leadership means understanding creativity”. They talk about ‘group interactions’, ‘cross team idea sharing’ and collaboration as being the pillars of new innovation within firms.
They insist that creativity in corporations occurs in a team environment. A lone innovator is seen as a ‘myth’. Alluding to the ideas from Pixar Animation Studios President Ed Catmull, the persistent thought is that teams are more important than the single idea.
A great team will either turn a mediocre idea into a great movie or jettison it, but a mediocre team will waste a great idea A great team can start with an average idea and be creative on the way, changing it as they go along. (Ed Catmull, How Pixar fosters collective creativity).
A new framework for Innovation in a corporate and teams: ‘Innovation is a C-word’
According to THNK scholars, innovation as a concept has two phases: the concepting stage and the realizing stage. They key is to remember that innovative leadership tends to create concepts that scale. They further go on to define what this scalability could mean for leaders:
“Scalable concepts are based on do-it-yourself tools: selling recipes is more scalable than running a restaurant. Scalable concepts are based on viral marketing and advocacy instead of advertising. Scalability translates directly into business performance. The most precious case of a scalable concept is one that feeds on itself over time. A commerce platform – stock exchange, online market place, buying cooperation – offers ever better deals when it attracts more volume and members. Concepts that are enriched by usage, e.g. a search engine or a recommendation system, become more valuable with market penetration over time. These concepts exhibit winner-take-all dynamics: over time the difference between the largest player and the smaller competitors increases and so a de facto standard materializes.
At the “concepting stage” the key leadership skills required include:
- The passion and purpose to go all out and create something new with a disciplined approach
- A big picture view with an ability to connect the dots – even in completely different fields
- The ability to let go of past assumptions and be a free thinker
- The ability to convince and engage others in a new idea
- The ability to attract other smart people or teams and create a great team atmosphere to lead such initiatives
At the ‘realization stage’ where such innovative ideas are incubated and accelerated, the key leadership skills and competencies required are:
- Tomorrow’s leaders need to convey ideas and concepts and be adept at storytelling
- Leaders need to be steadfast and flexible at the same time and in fact benefit from unpredictability of situations that may arise due to the newness of ideas and untested audience waters, if you may. The idea is to act, and run a feedback loop to test and improve, fast
- Team building is a critical component and leaders need to focus on diversity and high caliber individuals and how to attract and convince them to build together
- Leaders need to be able to lead from the front as well as have the ability to allow team members to take the front stage, and be able to swiftly shift between these two as needed
- Creative, out of the box thinking is an absolute must
The message that we derived out of all this is, that no matter the stage, the key to creating an innovative offering is: creative leadership skills. Innovations need creativity from thinking phase to the implementation stages.
For anything new that people are unprepared for, it is most critical to be able to think beyond the obvious and come up with new (though not necessarily new to the world) themes that add value to an existing process or product.
The need of the hour truly is: leaders bridging the divide between disciplines, set process, industries through creativity. This lends us back to the first question. Innovation is a C-word indeed, though, not necessarily coming from the C-Suite, but creativity in teams and people who think freely to make an attempt to try the new. THNK has come up with a new school of interdisciplinary C-Schools to generate and curate these ideas together! We hope this is useful to all of you struggling to come up with the next innovative idea!
This post has been adapted from the original post here. Vantage Point is happy to share findings on innovation and creative leadership from the original article that was posted by THNK.org authors.
This has been done in collaboration with the THNK team, as we believe this is going to be helpful to our readers who are in senior management jobs themselves and often work on matters of creative leadership and innovation.
