What we should be all able to agree upon is that the environment for innovation houses many of the conditions that connect innovation in people’s minds.
The environment needs to be connected to the vision around innovation, it needs to be translated for each of us to relate to and want to contribute.

The environment provides the right growing conditions for your organization to foster its unique environment to prosper and grow.
Deny those growing conditions and any innovation initiative is going to struggle and eventually die from the lack of the essential feeding of its roots.

Whenever I return to thinking about the environment for innovation I go back to my own roots of my initial innovation studies. The very first part of my innovation dissertation for my Master’s degree began by thinking over the cultural and climate conditions an organization needs.

Creating within the right conditions

For me the environment we create for innovation offers the place, time and space to chase after those innovation challenges. It needs to create within you those conditions, passions, commitments, and identifications that will inspire you to tackle the challenge.

It should be offering an environment that will allow you to be stretched both in body and mind to seek out something worthwhile, valued by others as making a contribution of turning ideas into winning propositions.

Working on the conditions that will have a clear impact on the way people think and behave needs a fair amount of thinking through. The environment is made up of the climate, the culture, and the conditions to allow creativity to blossom and grow.

Visualizing the Innovation Environment needed

Whenever I get asked the question: “so what makes up this innovation environment”, I think of a tree and its roots and the required environment it needs to prosper and grow.

The end result we require from setting in place the right conditions of having a climate and culture to innovate, is we get a whole lot closer to creating the environment for Creativity, the generation of new ideas, and Innovation, the translation of those ideas into useful new products, services or business opportunities that gives us fresh growth.

It is providing the appropriate conditions for interactions to happen between the person and the idea or concept is to ‘fuse’ this in new ways, through all the enabling factors that encourage ‘it’ to develop and then emerge as a final commercial concept.

This provision of the right conditions and enabling factors becomes our innovation environment.

Setting about understanding the work environment for innovation will determine partly the eventual success and impact innovation will have on an organization’s performance.

We start with our understanding of what makes up the climate for innovation.

The commonly held view is this climate reflects in different ways to each of us, in people’s perceptions and beliefs about the environmental attributes, shaping expectations about outcomes, requirements and interactions.

The level of moderators each of us relates to is partly determined by the conditions and how we see our place within the innovation activity required.

For example, are these set in turbulent times, is there real competitive pressure forcing us to react and then what are those real internal pressures to perform?

Also what is the make-up of the job on hand we are asked to undertake? The level of creativity and idea generation required, the type of innovation expected, the stage of our job within the innovation process (early, mid, late), the amount of discretion we are given, the rewards for any creative performance, the team construction and what we feel is the make-up of our own personal level of satisfaction, all influence our thinking. Each contributes to the climate and the conditions to innovate.

Then we are faced with those enduring patterns and beliefs of what shapes our culture.

Culture has often been described as the ‘collective programming of the mind”, it distinguishes the members of one social group from another.

Culture is usually sought out to be stable, deep and constantly reinforced by a history of decisions, the use of power and learning strategies for answering and setting about how we tackle fundamental questions.

We constantly reinforce our habits, our routines and decision-making in repeating ways. We are far more comfortable when we can assimilate new experiences with existing patterns.

The earliest association of the word culture was the way people in particular took care of the soil, in our own way, and how they successfully worked the soil was influenced by a number of key factors, all aimed at producing the best yield possible from all the contributing conditions.

It is how we have chosen to deal with certain situations or confronted with similar repeating problems. Culture becomes engrained in us, it is very hard to undo, let go and reform into something different, without considerable recognition and hard work.

According to Edgar Shein, one of the most cited writers in the field of organizational culture we have three main sources that form our cultures that often need challenging. The first is the beliefs, values and assumptions held over from the past, are passed on, repeated and accepted.

Then we have the exposure to learning experiences for us to evolve and grow. Then thirdly, is from the infusion of new ideas, members, leaders and practices.

As culture is such a deep, stable, complex set of shared assumptions that has built up over relatively long periods of time within most organizations, it is not an easy task to suddenly expect a new one for innovation, if this has not been part of this ongoing culture.

It is the changing of the patterns of behaviour, attitudes and beliefs and these are often deeply ingrained in us, causing rejection before acceptance.

Change requires the classic “unfreeze – transition- refreeze” as the journey we often have to travel.

Climate and Culture are distinct

Finally, our climates are distinct from our culture as they are far more observable at a surface level and far more amenable to change and improvement efforts.

The more we can change our climate the more it will, over time, influence our culture. They do have a very ‘creative tension’ between them when you set about change.

There are so many, often opposing forces, at work within our organizations. To create an environment for innovation to suddenly have impact, to provide the conditions to think and behave differently is a challenging task.

A next step is really too understand your climate for creativity.

I want to focus more specifically on the climate for creativity and innovation in a separate post but I would suggest there is no greater place to start to make change than to create the possibilities for individuals to have the power to experiment, to create, to develop and to test, simply to learn to innovate as a natural state.

This natural state can be encouraged and followed up constantly, not enforced but expected as part of everyday learning by all people, at all levels, all contributing to solving organizational problems, to inventing, designing new methods, approaches and contributing to new strategic thought.

Building the innovation environment certainly takes dedicated time

Building the environment for innovation take time, a dedicated understanding of its makeup and parts that influence or constrain it. It is working on the creative climate as this supports the new generation, consideration, assimilation of new working approaches, practices and concepts.

All I suggest is that this needs to be deliberate and well-led from the top, otherwise, it does not create this new innovative environmental condition for our tree, shown above, or its roots, to grow and spread and give a stronger foundation to weather changing conditions and rise to the innovation challenges.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Changing the workplace environment for innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Tackling the culture and climate that is needed to create a thriving innovation environment is complex.

In this post I can only touch on certain points to trigger that deeper examination and offer the stimulus and considerations it needs.

Within the Executive Innovation Work Mat we have seven domains or components that need bringing together to form a new integrated knot.

The aim of the work mat is to draw the senior executive into the innovation process and to support them as they think through what is required to build a more sustaining and integrated innovation understanding within the organization. Their role is a strategic one that sets the conditions and overview on innovation.

Tackling the culture and climate needs for innovation is my third article for raising questions in potential innovators minds. I have already offered some thoughts on Governance for innovation and the Environment conditions required. Before this current series I have extensively focused on the strategic alignment and leadership considerations for their engagement through this work mat approach.

Culture and the necessary climate do have a considerable effect on management practices.

I always gain the impression that the ‘harder side’ of innovation through its processes, technologies, structures and functions gets the greater attention. Partly because this is the more tangible side, yet the ‘softer side’ of climate, culture and environment makes or breaks innovation. “Culture is the playing field of the actions, transactions and interactions” (Hattori and Wycoff,2002) of the people who search and ‘work’ innovation. Dealing with a change in culture is complex.

• It is generally recognized culture moderates innovation, presently the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” attests to that. It influences the management practice, it provides the climate for relationships, and it directly influences behaviours and performance. Attention needs to always be paid to creating a positive culture and climate
• To foster innovation the ability to create an environment and culture that promotes creativity, promotes engagement and stimulates the ability to learn and embrace change needs knowledge to flow across the organization.
• The climate for innovation is the signals individuals receive on the expectations and outcomes required from innovation. This needs strategic alignment. This needs reinforcing in governance, function and design, structures, metrics, rewards, hence the real value of an integrated executive innovation work mat approach.

By working constantly on providing the ‘right’ conditions and climate required for innovation allows the culture to evolve and become increasingly innovative as part of its make-up. An innovation culture makes it so much easier for senior management to implement innovation strategies and plans.

Along with the environment, culture and climate determine either success or poor performance in eventual outcomes and the potential for sustaining innovation performance.

Creating a culture for innovation requires a new social contract.

In the mid-nineties the work of Goffee and Jones provided this idea of the social contract. If you want to set about establishing a new way of behaving it does need to become a new social contract.

The risk was that if it was not clearly seen as an improvement over the old, it just did not work any better, it would be consigned to being little more than the latest initiative or fad and treated as such. To change the culture requires the management of attention (Van de Van, 1996) otherwise you are constantly moving through different crisis.

• It is the management of the organization that determines the culture, its values, its practices and behaviours.  It is theirs to create. The creating of one that promotes creativity, is fully engaged, and has shared values and beliefs.
• The culture of the organization is ultimately a reflection of the leaderships own approach to their practices. If the leadership is seen to seek the short-term, varies its operating practices and does not apply the same value and practices it expects from others, it will never start a positive cultural change for managing innovation, unless through threat and fear, and that is not sustaining.

If an organization wishes to build a unique competitive edge, it is largely going to come through its people, the culture and practices they wish to stimulate.

In truth we face the hard questions that need leadership resolution?

• Culture can be the most important barrier to delivering on innovation programmes as Culture has a profound influence on innovation’s success, where is it in your thinking?
• Replacing all the past years of efficiency and right-sizing what will bridge the present feeling of little incentive, low energy, desire or motivation to consider new ideas or initiatives? Why would employees stick their hand up to be seen? The risks?
• How do you break the existing ‘business as usual’ culture that dominates?
• What do you do to overcome the “not-invented here” syndrome often found in most functions? How are you breaking down the silo’s of activity and knowledge?
• The organization ‘antibodies’ will fight innovation if they feel threatened
• What about all those years of pursuing the short-term, reacting to those ‘prevailing’ market conditions by downsizing becomes ‘baked in’ so anything new that is challenging this has a serious set of barriers to overcome. Can this change? Leaders need to decide.
• If you have employed the approach over many years of incremental is innovation how can you alter these existing behaviours, routines and practices associated with this ‘improvement’ only mentality?
• Middle managers fall back and use their existing tools, methods and techniques in poor attempts to manage innovation. They feel threatened and vulnerable and will block change unless they become part of the solution and not seen as ‘locked into’ part of the problem. This is a critical blocking point for innovation to ‘take hold’ or not.
• People are rational actors; they gravitate to the tasks aligned to their elevation, job description, reward metrics and background training.
• The choice of work tends to move towards safe, familiar products, structures and systems over the potential ‘risk’ associated with innovation unless something radically changes.
• Any system that reinforces the status quo will resist innovation as it is risky and insecure.
• Irrespective of the demands for innovation from the top, the established culture simply resists or makes token efforts.

So which ones apply in truth within your organization to resolve?

Our solutions need organizations to play for the long game.

There is the need to change many of the current factors that make up the culture and climate to achieve full engagement but this takes time and serious top management commitment

• It is recognized by 70% of our organizations from research, they regard the CEO as the most important source of developing a culture for innovation to thrive and survive.

• To identify the conditions to make this sort of substantial change in the necessary cultural attributes and characteristics is really hard work
• Changing prevailing attitudes, behaviours, compensation and rewards needs careful, considered and dedicated attention
• Corporate culture does not change easily or quickly, often the old submerges often waiting for the right time to resurface and regain its grip on this is the ‘why we do things around here’
• The work of a HR team and talent recognitions on how to innovate, the attributes, the traits and characteristics, and then understanding these needs auditing to discover what you have in potential. This enables you to decide what needs to come into the organisation to infuse it differently and then be specifically managed.
• This whole programme of possible renewal needs a robust internal and externally supporting set of programmes.

In summary we need to offer a culture that will look so different.

The ultimate aim is to instil a culture that places trust, open communication, and those behaviours that seek out innovation and rise to the challenge. A more open, confident culture that actively manages the risk, opportunities and learning as natural and exciting. One that has ‘measured failure’ as part and parcel of the knowledge gained and drawn experiences within the new culture.

A place where there is a growing sense of personal accountability, passion and pride and a reverence, appreciation and respect for tapping into the talent and knowledge that resides inside and outside the organization, where collaboration and networking is second nature.

Lastly where the orientation is outward looking, identification with the customer and their experience dominates thinking and innovation design.

People are the vital part in innovation

It can only be re-emphasised that people are the vital part to innovation, everything else is subservient. To build a lasting culture to innovate requires significant engagement and commitment and this can only come from the top with nothing else than their full engagement, otherwise it will not be perceived as important.

Changing the culture needs addressing in a comprehensive fashion or you will be left with much of the existing culture that will prevail and innovation’s performance will remain as it is currently, or will be much poorer if you attempt to meddle only with selective parts .

Is your organization’s existing innovation good enough? I would certainly question that it is in today’s hyper competitive globally connected world but tackling the culture needs real strategic commitment? The work mat draws out the issues to then wrestle with them and find the level of engagement achievable and what this will truly mean in the organization’s lasting bond with innovation. Leadership can only decide.

The post Recognizing the conditions for changing innovation in culture and climate first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.