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Leadership for innovation: what you cando to create a culture conducive toinnovation

Bettina von Stamm

There are many ingredients that need to be brought together when aiming to create an

innovative organization. However, there is one thing that can make or break it:

leadership.

Preconditions: sincerity and consistency

‘‘Innovation is key to the future of our organization’’ – it is essential that leaders mean this

when they say it. They need to believe it in their hearts, not only their heads, and they need to

live this conviction through deeds, not words. Therefore emphasizing the importance of

innovation in presentations and putting it into corporate communication is not enough.

People in your organization will observe closely what you are doing. Are your actions

matching your words? Are you truly serious about supporting innovation? As people react to

the behaviors they observe rather than the words they hear, what you say needs to be

consistent with what you do, and it needs to be consistent over time. Successful innovation

relies on supportive values and behaviors, and as it is about these values and behaviors

being consistent over time.

What you can do to support innovation through the three phases of the innovationprocess: search, selection, and implementation

Searching for innovation opportunities

It is not enough to ask people for ideas and more innovation. Good ideas about what?

Innovation of what kind? You need to give your staff an inspiring vision to contribute ideas to,

and you need to create a shared language around innovation that ensures everyone is

reading from the same page. The word ‘‘inspire’’ is deliberate and important because you

cannot tell people to be more innovative, you have to inspire them to be so. As Antoine de

Saint-Exupery (1900-1944) author and pilot says in his book The Little Prince, ‘‘If you want to

build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and

work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea’’.

You need to ensure that appropriate processes and structures are in place; appropriate in

the sense that they need to support the kinds of innovations you would like to see. More likely

than not this means that you will have more than one process, or at least different stages and

gates for different levels of innovation (e.g. incremental vs radical).

Do employees in your organization know where to go with their ideas? Do they understand

the organizational challenges and ambitions? Is there a process in place to capture, build

on, evaluate and develop ideas? Is it assured that those submitting ideas get timely

feedback? Will employees be able to understand and accept that decision? This is another

DOI 10.1108/02580540910952154 VOL. 25 NO. 6 2009, pp. 13-15, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 0258-0543 j STRATEGIC DIRECTION j PAGE 13

Bettina von Stamm is

Director of Catalyst,

Innovation Leadership

Forum, North Wootton, UK.

reason why a strong vision is so important: you need something against which to assess

ideas. If they do not contribute to achieving your vision you might as well use your resources

on other projects.

It is also not enough to wait for people to come forwards with their ideas. Leaders in

organizations should take it upon themselves to actively seek ideas and actively listen to

what people have to say – inside the organization (as well as outside). If you are sitting in

your office day in, day out, you are not likely to encounter exciting ideas. Remember, the truly

exciting things might be so ridiculous that people are reluctant to submit them initially, but

they might tell you if ask. This is not only about finding ideas but also about sending the

message that you are serious about innovation throughout the organization.

Also remember, the greater the number of players, and the greater the number of

interactions between the players, the greater the number of outcomes that you can get. (You

may want to read up on complexity theory in support of this!)

Selecting radical innovation opportunities

Be clear: if you want different levels of innovation, e.g. incremental and radical, you have to

use different selection criteria for each. The surest way of killing anything remotely radical is

to apply your standard selection criteria, which is likely to be aligned to support incremental

changes.

You may also want to ensure that the ideas are communicated in a way that the decision

makers can understand; beware that the way information is presented is critically influencing

whether a positive or negative decision is being made.

You may also want to think about the risk preferences of those involved. Are they comfortable

with uncertainty and ambiguity, and how strongly will this influence their decision? Internal

people might have a preference for the incremental and the preservation of the status quo –

even if at the rational level they understand the need for more radical innovation. For radical

innovation to succeed people need to buy into the argument not only with their heads, but

also with their hearts – not least as radical innovation is hardly ever supported by sufficient

evidence to satisfy the numbers-driven. To counter preference for incrementalism you may

want to bring external people with an appetite for great ideas and a passion for innovation

into the decision-making process, such as successful entrepreneurs.

Finally, make the assessment and selection fun: give people roulette chips or imaginary

bags of money to play with. Rather than another chore this can be an opportunity for senior

people to have serious fun. You might end up with everyone desperately wanting to be part

of the team looking at (radical) innovation – a better challenge than not being able to attract

key senior decision makers to the table.

Implementing radical innovation

As with the selection stage, implementing radical innovation requires measuring with

different yardsticks. This is why many organizations use alternative structures such as

hothouses, venturing units, or spin-outs. This often seems the only way forward as the culture

in the ‘‘mothership’’ is often so hostile that nothing remotely radical would have any chance

of survival, and because conditions in which radical innovation thrives are rather different

from those that are conducive for incremental innovation and smooth operations. Unless you

want to set up a separate business or business unit, your radical innovation will face

‘‘re-entry‘‘ into the mainstream at some point, and you need to think about this from the

outset. This has to be planned carefully as this is often the point where a great idea fails.

How this can happen is, for example, establishing high level sponsorship with a personal

passion for the project and a willingness to actively protect the radical innovation from the

organization’s immune system until it has had a chance to develop some deep roots.

You may also want to reconsider your ‘‘normal’’ expectations around timing. If something is

truly new you are likely to come up against snags that were impossible to predict at the

outset, you might need some skills you had not planned for, and you might go down some

PAGE 14 jSTRATEGIC DIRECTIONj VOL. 25 NO. 6 2009

blind alleys before reaching the best possible solution; even though the allegedly over 1,000

experiments Edison conducted to arrive at the light bulb, as we know it, might be a little

excessive.

This means that in order to come up with some true innovation you will have to accept failure;

experimentation and exploration are fundamental parts of innovation. In the context of

innovation I prefer to refer to ‘‘learning’’ rather than ‘‘failure’’. What is considered a ‘‘failure’’

often turns out to be an essential stepping stone to the next big innovation success. If you

view a failure as a learning opportunity it also becomes much less threatening.

Given all the above the big question for you is, are you, sincerely and committed, willing to

do what it takes to create a truly innovative organization?

Keywords:

Leadership,

Innovation,

Organizational culture

About the author

Bettina von Stamm, Director, Innovation Leadership Forum, is a contributor to The InnovationHandbook, published by Kogan Page, www.koganpage.com, hardback, 379 pages,£19.95. Bettina von Stamm can be contacted at: bettina@innovationleadershipforum.org

VOL. 25 NO. 6 2009 jSTRATEGIC DIRECTIONj PAGE 15

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