CHAPTER FOUR
NURTURING INNOVATION
AS ECONOMIC HISTORIAN AT THE prestigious Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Jiang Tzu Peng often pondered the remarkable past of the Heavenly Kingdom. His life’s work had been devoted to understanding the economic accomplishments and disappointments of his native China. China produced so many inventions, but the most populous nation on earth had relatively little to show for them. It was left to other nations, usually European nations, to exploit China’s many discoveries commercially.
History documents a remarkable series of Chinese inventions. Printing, first used in China, became an accomplishment that altered the creation of knowledge beyond anything the world had known. Yet, it was the 15th-century printing press of the German Johann Gutenberg that is credited with the spread of the printed word. Similarly, it was the Ts’ai Lun who invented paper, the material that made possible the inexpensive dissemination of printed materials to the population at large. But the mass production of paper was developed by the English, not the Chinese. And was it not the Chinese who invented the process to make silk, and thus influenced centuries of trade throughout the Far East?
The story doesn’t end there. Jiang noted that the first rigid horse collar, which permitted more efficient use of draft animals (without choking), also originated in China. So did gunpowder and porcelain. The Chinese were the first to use coal and coke in blast furnaces, Jiang noted, for the smelting of iron, and did so hundreds of years before Europeans. But there was no doubt it was the Europeans who built an industry on the knowledge. A water-driven machine for the spinning of hemp was used in China long before any similar device was discovered or employed in Europe. But the English produced a textile empire from the knowledge. And the list goes on.
The relevant question for Jiang was: If China discovered all these inventions, why was she apparently unable to exploit any of them? The answer was straightforward: No one was trying to capitalize on the innovations. Precisely the reverse was valued. Stability was cherished; change was to be avoided whenever possible. Thus, the environment evolved into one that was distinctly hostile to new ideas and innovations of every kind. No one understood better than Jiang that China is changing. While he wished often that his country could move faster, he was somewhat mollified by the fact that similar hostility to innovation still exists in many companies across Europe, North America, and the rest of the world, even today.
So, Jiang mused, perhaps China was not so poorly positioned after all. Perhaps the future would be brighter.
DEVELOPING AND NURTURING
AN ENVIRONMENT OF INNOVATION
SO, WHAT HAPPENED to the Chinese? There is little mystery in our example. There are several specific reasons for the Chinese failure to commercialize, which are outlined by David Landes.1 In Landes’s view, the Chinese were unable to exploit these monumental inventions because of:
•The absence of institutionalized property rights
•Societal values
•The larger pattern of totalitarian control
Landes’s observations of the Chinese experience reveal situations that are not so different really from our business environment today. Certainly, circumstances differ in the matter of degree. But on balance, there are useful parallels. In the first factor noted above, the absence of free markets, innovation is always stunted by the incentive of “stability,” and those who benefit from the existing situation object vigorously to relinquishing their advantage. Regarding the second factor, the absence of institutionalized property rights, certainly the West pretty much has institutionalized property rights in the national sense, but on the individual level, the employee may have no stake at all in the profits of the enterprise. The recent movement to broad-based stock ownership, both in compensation and in retirement plans, is a step in the right direction.
The third factor involves societal values. Most of the world today values economic achievement, but there are certainly countries where this is not true, even in this new millennium. Iran, Afghanistan, and many other countries view change and innovation much differently from the West. Their lack of economic vitality reflects the fallacy of trying to preserve the past at the expense of the future. Totalitarian control, the fourth factor, influenced the lack of innovation in China, and can be seen at work today in Iran and Afghanistan.
Reality is much different from long-ago China for those of us in the developed world. Every company innovates. Every person innovates. Innovation is as necessary to the normal operation of enterprise as it is to a major new product breakthrough. Even the meanest organization possesses some level of innovative activity. However, many organizations lack a sufficiency of innovative achievement to ensure their success. As with the historical Chinese, many businesses are simply not trying, presumably trusting that innovations can be pulled out of some mythical hat when they are most needed.
Every normal person innovates every day, though maybe in insignificant and unobservable ways. We are all capable of innovation, and when this propensity is encouraged, it often flowers with remarkable power and energy. However, when stunted or abused, either intentionally or unintentionally, the results can be equally powerful—but in a counterproductive way. Organizations usually get the innovation they nurture; they get the innovation they plan for. They get the innovation they deserve.
Three key elements can have a powerful effect on the environment for innovation. These are:
1.Management development
2.Strategy development
3.Employee development
We will look at each of these three elements in the pages that follow.
You can easily look at the nurturing activity cluster of the Innovation Management Model (see Figures 3-1 and Figure 3-4), as the pie chart shown in Figure 4-1. Nurturing activities are best envisioned as a managerial responsibility. The nurturing activities primarily take place in System IV—charged with creating the environment for innovation.
MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT
ONE SELDOM HEARS much about management development in discussions of innovation. Evidently, the presumption is that management is just fine, or possibly that managers are either incapable of or somehow exempt from innovation. While attending to all the day-to-day needs of the organization, too few executives tend to the care and feeding of their own skills. If innovation is as important to success as we believe it is, should we not direct at least some effort to developing the management skills necessary to stimulate and nurture innovation throughout the organization? There should be a concerted effort to develop management awareness and knowledge of at least the basic requirements for nurturing and sustaining an innovative organization.
MANAGEMENT FACTORS INVOLVED IN NURTURING INNOVATION
Numerous volumes have addressed the role of the executive in business today, so there is little point in reiterating common themes. There are, though, several points specifically related to nurturing and fostering innovation that are worthy of more attention. In no implied order of importance, they are:
FIGURE 4-1.THE “NURTURING PIE.”
•Personal understanding of the process of innovation
•Continuous learning and study
•Curiosity
•Openness
•Leadership
•Focus on strategic issues rather than operational tasks
Personal Understanding of the Process of Innovation
First is the executive’s personal understanding of the process and activity of innovation itself. If you have little interest in or regard for the process of innovation, then it is unreasonable to presume you can lead and manage innovation to superior results. How does innovation come about? Can it be structured—pursued methodically? How can you manage something you don’t understand? The manager’s learning process is enhanced considerably when innovators help managers learn more about what innovators do, how they do it, and how it contributes to company success.
Continuous Learning and Study
Continuous learning is the hallmark of every great executive. Maybe there was a time when the senior management could coast along on skills and knowledge acquired long ago, but if that was ever true it certainly is not now. Managers who sharpen their skills continuously can be confident they will remain valuable contributors.
Curiosity
Innovation is better managed by those with diverse interests and a curious nature. It’s not possible to fake interest in innovative ideas and projects when the manager’s heart just isn’t in it. The manager must be genuinely interested in possibilities to value innovation. The manager who is always interested in new things and new ways will invariably find it easier to develop and maintain a closer relationship with innovators in their organization. Innovators can tell who’s really interested.
Openness
Similarly, the manager must be receptive. The innovative organization thrives on openness—openness to the new and novel, openness to criticism and suggestion, and openness to learning from everyone and anyone. A manager who is open to new possibilities and to hearing from others is much more able to foster such an attitude in those working under her.
Leadership
Leadership implies an interest or even a passion for progress and for useful ideas. Continual improvement of organizational capabilities and competitive prowess is achieved through leadership. Leading an innovative organization certainly calls for even more of these qualities.
Focus on Strategic Issues Rather than Operational Tasks
A focus on the important and strategic rather than the operational is the mark of an effective executive. By important, we don’t imply that nonexecutive tasks are not important, but rather that the executive must, to do the job well, focus on those responsibilities that only the executive can accomplish. Every moment the executive spends doing nonexecutive work is wasted. Generally, if someone else can do the work, the executive should not be doing it. When the uniquely executive work is not getting done, the organization is the worse for it.
Can an organization be highly innovative within an environment hostile to creativity and innovation? We do not believe so, at least not beyond random acts of innovation that might peek through in spite of the environment. Can anyone but executive management create the environment for innovation? No. Subordinates may try, but significant innovation cannot be sustained without a companywide appreciation of the benefits, the reason, the purpose. That sense of perspective cannot be established entirely by lower-level managers, no matter how dedicated, if they do not receive commensurate support from the top.
A TAPESTRY OF CONTRADICTIONS
Management is nothing if not the art of manipulating contradictions into a coherent and efficient system to provide something someone wants. Figure 4-2 shows a sampling of the contradictions confronting managers every day. How the contradictions are resolved, as conscientious and responsible managers move the slider bar to the right or left, also determines the climate for innovation within the organization.
The contradictions shown in Figure 4-2 are familiar to all managers. Every manager is forced to try to find a balance among opposites. She tries to move the slide bar a bit farther in one direction, only to have to move it back again as situations change. She is constantly being pulled between competing opposites. Experienced managers also know that Solomon-like decisions are never really an either-or proposition. Instead, sound decisions are nearly always a balancing act that places the slider somewhere between the polar extremes.
FIGURE 4-2.A FEW OF THE CONTRADICTIONS MANAGERS FACE IN MANAGING INNOVATION.
THE DETERMINING DIMENSIONS
Four key dimensions determine the real environment for innovation. These are:
1.The generally perceived level of control
2.The operational structure of the organization
3.Access to and quality of corporate strategy
4.The overall level of organizational focus
Let’s look at the four dimensions.
The Generally Perceived Level of Control
Control issues are typically anathema to “creative types” if only because control is the antithesis of flexibility. Flexibility offers the means and the time to nurture innovation. Conversely, inflexible organizations are emblematic of bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is hostile to creativity and innovation. The bureaucratic behemoths are the poster companies for stagnation. Inflexibility in thinking, inflexibility in action, and inflexibility in seeing are all disabling afflictions. Finding an efficient and supportive balance between control and flexibility is one aspect of good management.
Certainly, strategy and strategic vision provide clarity and purpose (which we strongly advocate), but taken to extreme, clarity can engender blindness to new or serendipitous events and developments that provide grist for the innovation mill. With strategic focus, more is usually better than less, but on a scale of one to ten, few managers would seek a perfect score. The efficiently innovative organization is focused, not fixated like a doe caught in the headlights. The purpose of strategy is not to preclude innovation but to encourage it within bounds determined by organizational goals.
The Operational Structure of the Organization
The organizational dimension (discussed at length in Chapter 7) affects the environment for innovation. Organizational structure is seldom neutral. Structure can either encourage or discourage innovation. Systems theory places considerable emphasis on the idea that structure produces behavior.
In the case of systems theory, structure refers to the structure of the system, which is more encompassing than just the organization chart. It also includes the operating policies (see Chapter 8). In this respect, system structure is considered to be generative—i.e., it has the power to redefine and redesign itself through the decisions of managers. The structural level is thought to be the most powerful level of explanation in the systems vernacular.2
Structures encouraging unhealthy competitive attitudes are less supportive of cooperation and innovation. Strict functional structures often create barriers that, while supportive of the function, may unintentionally discourage new ideas and experimentation. Financial controls and procedures allocating resources are particularly susceptible to the creation of mischief.
Access to and Quality of Corporate Strategy
Knowledge of the purpose of one’s work is essential to simulating useful innovation. Sound corporate strategies, communications to employees in clear and relevant language provides the foundation for individual contributions to those strategies. People need to know where the organization is trying to go and how it is trying to get there before they can steer their innovation efforts in that direction. We all have probably encountered organizations where most of the employees knew nothing of the goals and strategies (presuming there were some), but were criticized for being slow to innovate.
The Overall Level of Organizational Focus
Focus sets the stage for either an internal or external orientation (shown in Figure 4-2 as external versus internal). A market focus is arguably the greatest stimulus to innovation because it orients attention to serving new customer needs and/or solving new customer problems, thus creating value. Just as necessity is the mother of invention, there is no substitute for understanding your customers as a springboard to good and marketable innovation.
THE COST OF COORDINATION
There is also a cost of coordination. By this, we mean the need for moderation in all things. As in the age-old “golden mean,” the moral is clear: Find the right balance. This is a challenge, and it’s one thing to say it but another to really believe it. Figures 4-3, 4-4, and 4-5 make the reason clear.
The primary performance drivers for any organization are quality, cost, and time. These are measures we can all see, quantify, and apply. We will use these three measures to examine our premise that there is a cost to excessive coordination—in short, a cost of excessive management.
On all three measures—quality, cost, and time—there is indeed a golden mean. Figure 4-3 shows how each driver can be represented as a U-shaped curve. The U-shape curve reflects the nature of cost behavior. The cost curves in the figure could reflect any category of decision. For example, let’s say we are concerned about the cost of direct labor hours. If we reduce direct labor hours, we see costs decline. But if we drive costs down so far that there’s no one to handle unexpected problems, or the scarcity of labor reduces flexibility to serve customer requests, real costs will again increase. The optimal situation is somewhere between the extremes of scarcity and excess.
FIGURE 4-3.THE COST CURVES OF THE PRIMARY PERFORMANCE DRIVERS.
The curves shown in Figure 4-3 make the moderation point more clearly. The curves are representative, as each organization differs, but it becomes immediately apparent that too much or too little control can have stultifying and unintended results.
Thus, you can see that moderation is a successful strategy. But as Figure 4-4 shows, there is another more subtle point to be made. As with any normal U-shaped curve, one finds a relatively wide range around the lowest (most favorable) point, where there is little evident change. In other words, it is not necessary to strive obsessively for the optimal point. Anywhere within the “success range” is nearly as good as any other. It is not necessary to micromanage the various dimensions. This is good news, since even getting close is hard enough. It is good (or at least comforting) that in many cases, close is also good enough.
FIGURE 4-4.THE RELATIVELY WIDE RANGE OF EFFECTIVENESS.
If you’d like to plot an overall view of your organization, you can take each of the dimensions shown in Figure 4-2 (hierarchy versus anarchy, control versus flexibility, external versus internal, etc.) and overlay one on the other to make up a single chart, as shown in Figure 4-5. Plotting your organization on each of the scales provides a visual map of the organization and may provide insight into desirable changes to make it more hospitable to innovation.
The diagram is just an example, but portrays an organization that one would expect to encourage innovation as the balance favor (the right side of the diagram). One could probably think of additional variables to add in appraising a particular organization. Such tools are admittedly imprecise, but are useful in helping us form a mental picture of the challenge at hand.
Managers are thus helped in three essential ways. First, those who set policy need to understand the implications of the decisions they make. Second, the expectations for innovation need to be viewed in terms of objective information regarding the state of the organization at the moment. And third, consistency is necessary to prevent setbacks to innovation.
FIGURE 4-5.PLOTTING AN OVERALL VIEW OF THE ORGANIZATION.
STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT
HOW MANY OF your company’s strategies depend substantially on the creativity or innovation of your employees? Some? Most? Even all? Well, then, is there a provision in your plan for specifically developing and exploiting your innovative ability? No? Why not?
If you answered no, your organization certainly is not alone. Few companies acknowledge the significance of innovation efforts to the extent of putting a strategy in writing. But innovation should at least be worthy of a meaningful discussion at your next planning retreat. Does each member of the planning team understand and appreciate the significance of innovation to your company? Do they really believe it’s that important? In our experience conducting many strategic planning sessions with executive teams, there is a very real tendency to fixate on operational issues and urgent issues, whether or not those issues are of strategic stature.
We’re not talking here about the obligatory “our employees are our most important asset” kind of statements that are dutifully included in nearly all strategic plans and value statements. We are speaking here of a comprehensive commitment to supporting and developing people as a matter of organizational values and management policy.
British Field Marshal B. L. Montgomery believed that the worst thing a leader could do was to divide his resources up into “penny packets” that could be defeated separately by an adversary weaker in overall strength, but superior to the divided unit it confronted. This is not a unique point of view: It is a bedrock of military strategy. Many businesses apparently are unaware of the strength of Montgomery’s wisdom and seek to serve all manner of customers. By trying to serve everyone who comes along, they are generally unable to serve any single segment better than their competitors. They lack a focused strategy.
From an innovation perspective, the lack of a clear strategy, understood by employees, reduces innovation to guesses as to what someone hopes might be useful. Why make people guess? So your competitors won’t know what you’re up to? Well, if your employees don’t know what you’re up to, your competitors’ knowing becomes irrelevant. You won’t be competitive enough for them to care. It’s much better to amass the resources of your organization behind a clear and effective strategy. Competitors usually will be unable to do much to combat an effective, well-conceived strategy anyway. But if your people do not understand what the strategies are, then it won’t matter. Many employee innovations go wasted, the casualties of poor communication of strategic direction.
EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT
EVERY ORGANIZATION IS aware of the need for employee development. Many have distinct functions devoted to employee development, some on the scale of small universities. Few, however, are as sincere in this regard as the U.S. armed services. In the U.S. military, education is encouraged at every level. No one is deprived of the opportunity for additional schooling because “there is no one to handle your job while you attend class” or “we don’t have enough budget for it this year” or “you’re responsible for your own education.” There may be nowhere on earth where education is more available than the U.S. armed forces.
But commercial organizations have at least as great a challenge. When we hear a manager say that he just can’t get his people to innovate or do what he thinks they should be doing, it’s a signal that something is wrong. Occasionally, one hears of a manager who thinks employees are stubborn, stupid, or otherwise just unwilling to “get with the program.” Such attitudes (mental models) may be difficult to change but fortunately seem less common these days. In any event, it is necessary to change the attitude or suffer the consequences of sullen contempt from the employees. The best managers know such consequences are unnecessary, unproductive, and undesirable.
When it seems that employees are simply not doing the “right thing,” it’s time to pause and think carefully about why it’s happening. Ferdinand Fournies provides an illuminating view of why many employees don’t do what they’re supposed to.3 Fournies offers sixteen reasonable explanations:
1.They don’t know why they should do it.
2.They don’t know how to do it.
3.They don’t know what they are supposed to do.
4.They think your way will not work.
5.They think their way is better.
6.They think something else is more important.
7.There is no positive consequence to them for doing it.
8.They think they are doing it.
9.They are rewarded for not doing it.
10.They are punished for doing what they are supposed to do.
11.They anticipate a negative consequence for doing it.
12.There is no negative consequence to them for poor performance.
13.There are obstacles beyond their control.
14.Their personal limits prevent them from performing.
15.There are personal problems.
16.No one could do it.
Without elaborating on each reason, it is pretty obvious that Fournies’s reasons are all good ones with which many readers can doubtlessly identify.
Many companies today have exemplary employee development programs, and each company receives benefits that far exceed the cost. There are many dimensions to a complete employee development program. The best programs result from sincere belief on the part of management that employees perform much better when they receive a little help. These organizations tend to freely offer employees the benefit of the doubt in their personal development and resulting benefits to the organization.
The following are some suggestions for ways to foster employee development. You should consider providing your employees with:
•Books
•College courses
•Management seminars
•Professional seminars
•Study time allowance
•Internal training courses
•Internet education materials
•Cross-training in multiple jobs
Employee development is every manager’s job—maybe the most important job. Are managers in your organization evaluated on the achievements of their employees, on the professional growth of employees in their charge? Are they seen as husbanding a valuable resource? Are your managers allowed an adequate education budget to use as they think best? Or have cost-reduction programs forced employee development programs into suspended animation?
NECESSITY VERSUS OPPORTUNITY
EVERY DAY THERE are those who innovate in small ways to accomplish small but useful tasks. These small achievements are generally overlooked in the literature of innovation, possibly because they’re not very exciting. Of these unsung achievers, none has a richer history of such innovative accomplishment than does the small farmer, who often worked on the frontier of civilization, far from the resources of skilled tradespeople who could provide services for them. These independent souls were compelled to provide for themselves.
Often, survival was at stake, and the difference between feeding a family and going hungry was creativity—in addition to a lot of hard work, of course. Those capable of innovating and adapting were the ones who succeeded rather than simply survived. Most farm machinery was designed and even built by farmers, not by a large industrial corporation as we would expect today.
For example, the “jet boat” propulsion system was actually designed by a farmer, C. W. F. Hamilton of Tekapo, New Zealand. In New Zealand, there are many bodies of water too shallow for conventional outboard motors to operate without the propeller striking bottom. Hamilton needed a way to get feed to his sheep on the far side of just such a shallow body of water, and it was time-consuming and annoying to go all the way around each time. His solution was a device to pump the water out the back of the boat to propel the boat forward with no propeller at all. From these humble beginnings we have the sophisticated jet boats we see on recreational lakes around the world today, because Bombardier of Canada took the concept and translated the jet pump into the personal water craft. Bombardier, which faced seasonal scheduling problems because of its reliance on snowmobile production, innovated by making use of Hamilton’s invention, arriving at the SeaDoo personal watercraft, which provided a summer product that balanced the company’s production surge in winter products.
All manner of farm equipment—specialized to perform specific chores such as spraying, weeding, harvesting, pruning, or fertilizing—have been the innovations of small farmers. One reason is the multitude of skills necessary to be a successful small farmer. The small farmer generally maintains his own equipment as it may be a long, slow trip to a dealer service center. It’s also cheaper, always a concern on the farm. The array of equipment found in the average small farm maintenance shed is impressive but not at all unusual: maintenance tools, hand tools, welders, and maybe basic machine tools. This experience of using such equipment provides skills of such breadth and diversity as to be quite unusual today. Many innovators in far-flung fields owe their skills to having grown up on the farm.
The sad part of this story is that the small farmer may be slowly passing from the scene in the progress of economic development and the corporate agricultural industry (at least in North America). It will be a genuine loss, along with that of the “shade tree” mechanic, the watchmaker, the small town barbershop, and doctor who makes house calls. The moral of this story is that as we become more specialized and focused in our specialized professions, it becomes even more desirable to provide cross-disciplinary experience. We need all the skills available in order to successfully innovate. At the very least, multiple skills are infinitely preferable. We may no longer be generalists out of necessity, but we can achieve a broader range of experience to fertilize our imaginations, and we can do so intentionally.
CREATING THE FAVORABLE
ENVIRONMENT FOR INNOVATION
ENVIRONMENTS CAN EITHER favor innovation or be hostile toward it.
THE FAVORABLE ENVIRONMENT
Trust lies at the heart of any healthy organization, and certainly at the center of innovative organizations. Openness provides the opportunity for the innovator to freely discuss and propose ideas that in the early stages may be easily criticized and vulnerable to the sarcasm of the closed-minded. Adaptability provides the organizational resources necessary to accommodate or even welcome change—the kind that comes from innovation. Flexibility provides adaptability on a day-to-day basis. Rigid, rule-obsessed organizations always have trouble innovating. A clear sense of purpose guides innovation activities in directions that more closely fit the organization. The better the fit, the less adaptation is required, and the greater the likelihood of the innovation being accepted and implemented.
Valuing creativity goes a long way to encouraging innovative behavior, and demonstrating to employees that innovation is important and valuable requires some form of recognition. Valuing innovation goes far deeper than occasional words of praise or pay raises. Those who do the good work know when they’ve done something important and valuable. To them, patronizing words are worse than nothing. But genuine praise and appreciation can move mountains. There is little that motivates any of us more than genuine appreciation of our good work. Person-to-person appreciation goes a long way toward communicating this appreciation.
In short, recognition needs to be overt and demonstrated to be effective. Recognition need not take the form of an extravagant gift, a large raise, or even public acknowledgment, although all have their place. But care must be taken with tangible rewards, particularly if there are already perceived to be inequities among “contributors.” Fairness and appropriateness are good bottom-line measures. When a manager gets a $20,000 raise for cutting costs by $100,000, one should not expect a designer to be delighted with a write-up in the house organ for having created the most successful product of the decade. You must take into account the perception of relative fairness. When people are treated and rewarded fairly for their day-to-day contributions and their exceptional contributions, innovation is supported.
THE HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT
We also need to look at innovation from the opposite direction. To achieve innovation, it’s helpful to understand what prevents innovation. And what prevents innovation is found more often in the background than in the foreground.
Environments unfavorable to innovation represent more than simply the absence of the desirable qualities recorded above, though they certainly are that. The hostile environment is seldom malicious. Generally, hostile environments are only the result of the misinformed good intentions of one or more managers.
Some managers are perfectionists, for example. They seek to produce only exemplary work, but by trying so hard to avoid mistakes, they create an environment of extreme risk avoidance. Employees are extolled to do the best work—the highest-caliber work—but what they hear is “take no risks” or “make no mistakes.”
A manager may have been instrumental in developing a particular process, system, or product. She may feel justifiably proud of that achievement. It may have been the reason she was promoted to management. Her sincere belief in the existing approach as the best way may blind her to new and innovative ideas by subordinates. None of us like to see our brainchild replaced by someone else’s.
Simple enlightenment may be sufficient to produce a corrective effect. Few managers want to be associated with the hostile environment or be saddled with the reputation of cretin or ogre.
Oddly, such environments are seldom obvious to those responsible for them. In ancient China, those in power sought stability, and by so doing, they reduced innovation completely so as to preserve the status quo—a status quo that was distinctly favorable to those in power. They saw no need to encourage innovation. Today, there are fewer intentional obstructions to innovation and a greater understanding of the necessity to change and improve. The challenge in the coming millennium is to remove the unintentional obstructions to innovation and vitality.
SUMMARY
•It is a conscious act to create an environment conducive to innovation. It does not happen or survive without management support.
•Nurturing innovation involves three distinct activities: (1) management development, (2) strategy development, and (3) employee development.
•Managing the tapestry of contradictions is the key challenge and determines whether the environment is supportive or hostile to innovation.
•Overmanaging can be counterproductive.
•Employee development efforts and exposure to diverse experiences give a huge boost to innovation.
•The innovative environment is usually one that:
Is trusting.
Is open to new ideas and alternative approaches to solving problems and exploiting opportunities.
Operates in an environment of adaptability.
Operates in an environment of flexibility.
Is goal-directed with a sense of purpose.
Demonstrates that innovation is valued.
Recognizes innovative achievements.
NOTES
1. The scholar Jiang Tzu Peng is fictitious. The Chinese inventions are real.
2. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
3. Ferdinand P. Fournies, Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed To (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988).