Who is responsible for giving feedback on innovations

Are resource-constrained entities more creative because they have to find ways of dealing with the constraints? One question posed by this panel member sums up the tension associated with management's role in creativity and innovation: Is there "a theoretical sweet spot where scale fosters innovation, beyond which the complexity starts to stifle it?

A third executive will raise questions concerning the impact of the Internet on the management of these processes. He will lament the "'lone genius' myth of creativity and innovation that may be limiting our ability to make meaningful progress in everything from technology to organizations to education—even society itself. But in doing so, does it foster a kind of anarchy in which ideas flow directly between innovators with little involvement by management in a networked world?

In fact, are management processes so out of tune with networked processes that they will represent a brake on collaborative innovation? The fourth will ask what needs to be done to foster a culture of creativity in an organization. Specifically, how do managers avoid "the temptation to apply simplistic process management tools to the discovery process? One feature of these questions, posed independently by four thoughtful senior practitioners, is their remarkable consistency.

How to winnow out the bad from the good? Have people from a variety of disciplines, functions, and viewpoints act as filters. By definition the ability to create something novel and appropriate, creativity is essential to the entrepreneurship that gets new businesses started and that sustains the best companies after they have reached global scale. Creativity has, however, long been a focus of academics in fields ranging from anthropology to neuroscience, and has enticed management scholars as well.

Therefore, a substantial body of work on creativity has been available to any businessperson inclined to step back from the fray of daily management and engage in its questions. The shift to a more innovation-driven economy has been abrupt.

Today, execution capabilities are widely shared and the life cycles of new offerings are short. As competition turns into a game of who can generate the best and greatest number of ideas, creativity scholars are being asked pointed questions about their research.

What does it mean? How relevant is it? Does it offer guidance on the decisions that leaders in creativity-dependent businesses have to make? To help make the connections between theory and practice, we recently convened a two-day colloquium at Harvard Business School, inviting business leaders from companies whose success depends on creativity—such as design consultancy IDEO, technology innovator E Ink, internet giant Google, and pharmaceutical leader Novartis.

At the gathering, leading scholars presented their newest and most important research. In all, we brought together nearly people who were deeply concerned with the workings of creativity in organizations and let the sparks fly. Over those two days, we saw a new agenda for business leadership begin to take shape. At first, we heard skepticism that creativity should be managed at all. One manages for creativity. The first priority of leadership is to engage the right people, at the right times, to the right degree in creative work.

That engagement starts when the leader recasts the role of employees. Rather than simply roll up their sleeves and execute top-down strategy, employees must contribute imagination. But increasingly, managers are not the source of the idea. Cook told the story of an eye-opening analysis of innovations at Google: Its founders tracked the progress of ideas that they had backed versus ideas that had been executed in the ranks without support from above, and discovered a higher success rate in the latter category.

Research by Israel Drori, a professor at the College of Management in Israel, and Benson Honig, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, highlights the hazards of not distributing creative responsibilities across the organization.

They observed an internet start-up offering a new, sophisticated form of computer graphics from its inception in until its collapse, seven years later. While the venture enjoyed initial success, it was ultimately unsustainable because it depended too much on the genius of its award-winning artist-founder—and took organizational creativity for granted.

And the fundamental structure of such networked organizations is not centralized and top-down. Contributing to an interdependent network is its own reward. His analysis of six award-winning products from three quite different industries showed how product development teams used not only prototypes but also metaphors, analogies, and stories to coordinate their thinking.

How to remedy that? Wryly, he recalled seeing powerful people hold forth in meetings even though others in the room had much better ideas for solving problems. Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect , described his finding—based on interviews with people doing highly creative work in many fields—that innovation is more likely when people of different disciplines, backgrounds, and areas of expertise share their thinking.

Even within the mind of an individual, diversity enhances creativity, according to a study by Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, a professor at the University of Michigan, his Michigan colleague Fiona Lee, and Chi-Ying Cheng of Columbia University. Their research focuses on people who have multiple social identities, such as people who are both Asian and American, or who are both women and engineers. Social identities often have distinct knowledge associated with them, and to the extent an individual is comfortable integrating multiple identities, his or her knowledge sets can combine productively.

One experiment asked Asian Americans to invent new forms of Asian American fusion cuisine, and the other asked female engineers to imagine new features for a cell phone for women. This research sparked a great deal of personal interest and has implications for management. If managers cause people to suppress parts of their identity, they limit a potentially valuable source of creativity.

Managers can also enhance diversity by looking outside the organization for sources of creativity. Collaboration need not be bounded by the walls of the firm, as Rodriguez noted, pointing again to networked organizations such as Wikipedia.

Many, in fact, see the recent phenomenon of open-source development as the future of innovation. For those who may worry that open-source innovation is still unproven and relevant only in software, Peter Meyer, an economist with the U.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, put the matter in perspective. In the years before the commercial potential of aviation was recognized, the Wright brothers were just two of many enthusiasts who shared their discoveries and ideas freely and frequently in the manner of avid hobbyists. The openness of the network, Meyer showed, greatly assisted the development of the airplane; the Wright brothers participated actively in it from through However, as the Wrights realized how important their breakthroughs were likely to be in creating viable commercial and military aircraft, they focused on securing patents and finding ways to make money from their inventions.

Collaborators became potential competitors, and secrecy the new norm among them. The dual implications of this research are intriguing. Open-source innovation, with its ability to tap the passion and ingenuity of tinkerers, offers enormous potential for creative output, and new industries with proprietary or secret technology can arise from it. But open-source processes may work only in certain kinds of endeavors or for limited windows of time.

Can creativity scale? She believes that creativity within an organization depends on vibrant, ongoing collaboration and free idea flow—which tend to dry up as a business adds people and projects. A former entrepreneur Scott was involved in three start-ups before joining Google , she hates the fact that more layers of management often lead to more bureaucracy—and the end of entrepreneurial spirit, risk taking, and learning from mistakes.

At the same time, she recognizes that it is not reasonable to have organizations so flat that managers are saddled with dozens of direct reports. The study not only illustrates the economic importance of motivated employees, but also shows that the right managers are much more important motivators than working environments, incentives or salaries.

A company needs employees who show entrepreneurship within the company - people who have the mindset of a startup founder but work for a company. Corporate entrepreneurs are an extreme example of innovation culture, but even small gestures on the part of the manager bring the innovation culture in the right direction:. An essential success factor for every innovation is the innovation culture in a company.

Managers play the key role here. If they see themselves as coaches, transfer decision-making authority, give regular feedback and value the ideas of their employees, the motivation of the employees and thus also the innovative ability of the company increases significantly.

Please also read our article " 10 Measures to create a culture of innovation ". Born in Vienna. We would be pleased to advise you on a possible cooperation to make your innovation management future-proof. Date: Oct Posted by: Julian Eberling.

Category: Innovation culture. Motivated employees as the key to innovation The most important factor for a company's ability to innovate is the motivation and commitment of its employees. The study divides companies into those with high and low employee commitment: Innovation culture: Only 10 percent of companies with low commitment have an innovation and error culture, while the percentage in companies with high commitment is 91 percent. A similar picture can be seen when managers deal with mistakes made by employees.

Managers as coaches: In companies with a high level of employee commitment, managers focus more on people-related management tasks such as coaching, feedback and employee motivation. In companies with a high level of commitment, all managers percent!

Furthermore, the leader should operate an open-door policy to encourage collaboration and transparency between all teams and across all hierarchies. A safe innovation space will encourage all members of the business to engage with the process, no matter their hierarchy. Just because an idea has come from the new intern does not mean it lacks credibility or value.

Often these employees generate the best ideas, as they know the systems inside out. Accordingly, sometimes managers or directors can overlook what is important because they are removed from some of the internal processes, especially in larger companies.

We often emphasise the importance of rewards and recognition in order to motivate and incentivise. Even the most steadfast employee requires acknowledgement that their hard work is paying off. As a leader you need to be establishing an effective reward system that will encourage participation. Innovation does not just have to be about proactive innovation, it can also be reactive. In other words, set targets and challenges to give staff an objective to work towards and attach a reward.

It is important to avoid only recognising short-term performance and to start considering the broader need for rewards. Innovation is not a solitary pursuit and should bring together collective minds to create great ideas. Often new ideas spur other notions and as a result, bringing individuals together can significantly increase the pool of innovation concepts.

A leader will need to generate a network of innovators where the creative juices can flow constantly and ideas can be continually bounced around and improved upon. When people and their different points of view and experiences converge, they create the types of innovations that individuals could not have done or found alone.

A hierarchical environment can be a hindrance to innovation, therefore it is necessary to break down these barriers.