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.

The Executive Innovation Work Mat methodology requires investigation and engagement across the seven domains or components that make up the work mat.  The aim of any work mat discussions undertaken with executives focuses upon bringing out the parts necessary for innovation to happen and that needs an integrated approach and lasting engagement from senior management.

In a series of articles I will be looking at each of the seven components within the work mat to raise questions to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations determined to build a lasting innovation competence and structure.

I’ve already offered some opening thoughts on Governance and Innovation, for me one of the basic building blocks for innovation lies in creating the right conditions for an Environment to innovate.

So what are those environmental conditions required for innovation?

You can’t escape the fact having the right environment for innovation means different things to different people. It has general conditions, a ‘broad church’ approach that needs to be consciously set about to create the atmosphere that encourages and nurtures innovation.

The environment needs to be connected into the vision around innovation, it needs to offer many of the conditions that connect innovation in people’s minds, so it translate into “that fantastic place to work” or “I feel listened too, valued and making a contribution”. Innovation needs the right conditions and for your organization to foster a unique environment to prosper and grow.

The Environment offers the place, time and space to chase after those innovation challenges. It ‘creates’ conditions that inspire you, you want to be stretched both in mind and body to achieve something worthwhile, valued and making a contribution, turning ideas into winning propositions.

The environment needs to resonate so you can feel the buzz.

Increasingly organizations are recognizing the cubicles and boxes provided are killing creativity, reducing communications and creating the space for increased withdrawal. We are killing the meaning at work.

For innovation to work, we need to open up the minds, work hard at creating a physical space that is well designed, offering the opportunity for allowing engagement in. To achieve a certain association with a working environment makes people comfortable and wanting to be more creative, engaged and eager to take part.

We need to offer creative spaces, we need to let in light, and we want to offer back the “inner work life” that gives up the emotions, motivations and perceptions as suggested by Teresa Amabile in her co-authored piece “How leaders kill meaning at work.”  People need a sense of purpose beyond the mundane and it does come from the working conditions with the consistent actions to reinforce this, and this comes from the top of organizations.

Firstly we need to reflect on what innovation needs to overcome

• Innovation spans multiple time frames; it cuts across business disciplines and challenges the corporate silo. Every corporate boundary set up in physical space, in rules and regulations is already full of ‘yawning’ gaps for ideas and energy to flow across and close those disconnected gaps.

• There are considerable hurdles for innovation to overcome. The larger your organization the harder it is for innovation to flow. Executives need to consciously work on breaking down boundaries, challenge fixed mind sets,inertia or dogma’s and conflicting needs that lurk in each corner of the building or across the global organization.

• The ability to consciously encourage a positive supportive environment is vital. The ability to draw people in, to unite them over goals, priorities and their allocated responsibilities and how they are open and receptive are simply a daily task we need to work on, all the time.

Measures for the environment start with the ‘broad brush’ and then refine

• Executives through a ‘broad brush’ approach can define interactions, behaviours and resolution procedures. These generalizations become important; they give you the line of sight, the ability to measure your environment and evaluate how it is functioning. Your can begin to ‘sense and feel’ this.

• Organizations increasingly need to develop the conditions that allow people the collective abilities to react quickly and be more agile in their work. The ability to be authentic and get the true needs on the table, understood and shared provides closer association and part of any organizations greater alignment objectives

• Then you seek out the ability to create top down, bottom up combinations and where you work consciously to reduce the middle that is often blocking this.

• Finally, the combination of abstract levels for encouragement of fresh thinking and the ability to provide degrees of freedom to organize and act are important to build for the right environment conditions.

Structuring the conditions for the innovation environment

Organizations clearly struggle with complexity. Knowing where the knowledge resides helps unlock this. The growing use of centres of excellence can help here

There is an increasing recognition that knowledge management does need a system that structures it accordingly so people can explore its key phases to help them. I’ve written a fair number of times on Absorptive Capacity and its great value to managing the knowledge flows required for innovation. We need to acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit and our complexity needs to address these basic needs.

The openness to others both internal and external, needs creating the right open conditions to change, to exchange, to encourage that ability to act so as to capture and communicate opportunities that are flowing all around you, inside and outside your organizations.

A code of trust becomes so vital to creating the right conditions for an environment to innovate. I wrote some time about the two sides of an equation for shaping innovation. One was the environment and other was its governance. Governance must be explicit on trust and how it intends to foster and manage this. If you lose trust, you lose the pulse required for innovation. These two together offer the conditions to allow innovation to prosper or be constantly constrained.

The challenge is redesigning the new workspace

We are working far more at managing by exception and innovation aids this learning. We are working through the combining of vertical and physical worlds, we are extending beyond our own ‘working’ environment increasingly. Environments need to permit individuals to ‘craft their own ways’ through what they learn, how they engage, what they contribute. Our environment needs to embrace a more social one. Knowledge understanding and translation need the right environment to be allowed to flow.

We need to give greater recognition to the organizations intangibles.

We can so much easier relate to the tangibles within our organization. If you can touch it, you can measure it. Well you need to understand the intangibles make up far more of the value of our organizations, some up to 80% and also are essential to understand their source. Intangibles within our environment are made up of the attitudes, outlooks, our ability, space and feeling that allows for greater creative thinking. They make up much within our relationships, networks and connections to allow us to work or block us to feel frustrated.

We seek to encourage open expression, to challenge strange and often those many constraints in our working conditions that need challenging and resolving to either thrive or die. These are invisible walls to the naked eye but can be as permanent as any walls or the things we can touch. Much within our make-up is very intangible and implicit and needs to find space to grow, be valued and be demonstrated in explicit ways. I’ve written before about the ‘nested effects‘ of knowing all our capitals.

Giving responsibility for innovation to everyone

Lastly, I wrote finding space for growing innovation and it brings me back to setting up the general conditions for the environment to innovate. These statements of intent have real value: We need shared responsibility for innovation, we need to encourage knowledge as a central task, we need to work on being ‘collectively conscious, knowing our space and beyond for contributing to innovation. We need to foster respect for others knowledge and expertise and we need to become increasingly adaptive.

The environment we must seek for innovation needs to provide the ‘dynamics’ within our organization’s social fabric, to allow the conditions we believe in too simply flow. Getting those general conditions established allows innovation to take hold and become our future culture.

The post The environment for innovation does really matter first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When it comes to fostering innovation we do get more into the fuzzy part that for many is made up of more the intangibles that covers culture, climate and conditions to innovate. These increasingly make up the environment for innovation.

There is another side of the equation, less fuzzy if you determine its parts well, and that is its governance.

For me, the environment and governance make up the formal and informal part of fostering innovation. I’d like to touch on both here in this blog.

There are clear correlations between having formalized innovation governance and structuring your environment both well and thoughtfully. Then you perhaps don’t need to rely on  miracles

There is, I feel, much to be gained by managing both sides of a formal and informal set of innovation approaches, made of both offering guidance and setting the tone and atmosphere that make up the environment and governance of innovation.

One side is more specified, considered and driving innovation, the other is more articulating, nurturing and encouraging.

The Environment for Innovation
There is always far more written about the culture of innovation than the environment for it. Why is that?

The fostering of the environment to pursue innovation means different things to different people. An innovation environment is made up of creating the atmosphere to encourage and nurture, it needs a vision which totally connects innovation in people’s minds.

It could translate in its meaning for many just being in ‘an amazing place to work’ or it means creating and encouraging new spaces to stimulate different thinking. It might encourage through simply providing the space to stimulate; the generation of ideas, a place that fosters interaction and collaboration.

The environment offers the place and space to chase after those challenges, to be somewhere that inspires, to be pushed and stretched, both in minds and bodies, to achieve new and great innovation.

Changing the environment by encouraging certain attributes does change people’s behaviour and beliefs. In thinking through the environment you wish to achieve, you are just not looking to sow the seeds for the new that is about to happen but to harvest the crop that is often simply residing.

You want the current box to get bigger and  you seek others to push out its sides but in realistic and managed ways, that meet the organizations objectives but give them growing pride and satisfaction.

To achieve this you need to link this and communicate it in ways that resonate, that become the common language of the organization and this also partly comes through the other side, the Governance of Innovation.

This needs thinking through well, articulating and ensuring it is in place, each day on a consistent basis. Getting the right environment in place for innovation needs to be pursued and worked upon at all levels but the leadership must set the tone, the vision and provide the means to achieve this.

The Governance for Innovation
Governance sets out different procedures to capture and translate an array of diverse thinking and interactions, to make innovation effective in providing that right environment.

Establishing a more formal innovation governance structure that deals with issues surrounding funding, balancing short and long-term objectives, seeking alignment and allocating clear responsibilities all can fall under this. It can also be the decision-making point of reference.

Recently there has been a great series on Governance by Jean-Philippe Deschamps, professor of technology and innovation management at IMD Lausanne, Switzerland. the first in a series of articles is here  http://tinyurl.com/d698jd5

Governance is often about struggling to obtain consistency, to balance demands; the environment is about pushing the bounds of stimulating and promoting fresh thinking. This stimulating environment needs its evaluation and how it sets about how ‘it’ fosters interactions and collaboration.

It is the atmosphere and conditions put in place as the environment that seeks to achieve out of the ordinary, great innovation, it is the governance that tries to make this orderly and fitting. This is a constant ‘dance’ and you need the environment and governance to tango to make this happen.

Complexity in Degrees

As innovation increases in complexity, you can get a decrease in the effectiveness of the innovation function. You need to constantly balance between freedom to explore and experiment and achieving accountability and control.

This is the ‘dance’ between managing the environment for allowing innovation to flourish with the guidelines to shape this.

Managing both does take a certain amount of creativity, especially when you are working on those big bets. As you work across functions, across boundaries and sometimes across known, established categories you need that governance to revert too.

If you don’t have clear governance you can quickly poison the atmosphere and create a negative environment.

Within this balance you do need to seek alignment to have available intervention tools but keep checking against innovation ambitions. If you don’t know what the environmental conditions should be and how people should behave and you fail to provide the formal mechanisms you can end up with a unhealthy innovation environment, even though some of the other innovation factors are in place.

The Meeting in the Middle

To orchestrate both a thriving environment for innovation and being able to provide the guidelines of the governance, needs to meet in the middle. The two sides within this equation need to find common cause, a common language, develop the protocols and appropriate communication methods.

Openness and trust fosters innovation and the environment so that can have a consistent flow of internal communications across the organization that promotes. Putting openness and trust into the heart of innovation you encourage and infuse the environment and in so doing, help the governance.

“Working innovation well” needs a focus on relationships so each person can relate to each other and seek other out in a collaborating atmosphere built on trust and openness.  It needs constant information sharing in feedback and more structured ways. It needs clear decision-making, built up around ground rules that are both formal and informal that sets the tone but does not suppress innovation.

Finally, you need innovation leadership effectiveness that encourages certain behaviours, sets the standards and norms and constantly talks about the vision and mission that innovation is set around.

Achieving Balance

Balancing the two sides, of building the environment to promote innovation and the governance to formulate and guide you, enable you to get far closer to successful work execution.

By setting about in constructing the rules, offering guidelines, promoting norms and values, along with encouraging openness and trust you can transform your innovation efforts.

By supporting and promoting certain behaviours and skills that build upon knowing what capabilities and competencies can promote innovation, you do actually get a lot closer to the contextualize of the innovation framework in all these combined efforts.

This more integrated approach gives organizational intent, commitment and growing fit.

To offer both clear boundaries and freedom needs the environment and governance to dance in tandem for great innovation. Are you taking innovation dancing lessons?

The post Two sides of an equation for shaping innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

All around us we have culture. Where we live, how we see ourselves against others, who we identify with and how we react when ‘our’ culture gets threatened. We become comfortable, sometimes complacent and treat ‘our’ culture as something that is just there, just around us, wrapping us up in a warm blanket.

Every now and again we get confronted. It can be within the community we live, it can be within our organizations. Innovation is one of those confronting points that challenge our accepted culture.

Organizational culture forms an integral part of our general functioning. A strong culture tends to indicate a set of shared values that move the ‘whole’ along we then get that feeling we are on the same track.

The more we integrate, the more we coordinate, the more we socialize we eventually create the accepted boundaries, that feeling of growing identity among ourselves that seems to signal a similar commitment to the organization.

The sudden demand for innovation needs managing thoughtfully

Then along comes this demand for more innovation, think differently, speed up, we need to outsource, to open up and suddenly our world gets challenged. We become defensive.

Unless this is handled carefully and thoughtfully we lose our shared meaning, the social glue becomes less binding and actually the very opposite happens, culture begins to significantly reduce our efficiency within our organization. We start freezing, the very opposite of what innovation is asking of us.

Rational tools and processes only go part of the way in unfreezing this. We need to find more ‘expressive ways’ to show why, what and how innovation needs to be brought in and allowed to alter and shape our existing culture and practices.

The critical enablers

Of course we need to often go back to the drawing board, when we are shaping a new culture based on innovation. We need to craft a new mission and vision; we need to explain the realities of the external environment and why innovation is important, we need to offer the means to meet our new aims of becoming more innovative.

Then, with a deeper breath we need to fashion a new image of the organization, offer new processes, structures and tools to enable and work with innovation.

Most importantly we need to consider employee needs and their objectives and identification with why we want innovation to take hold, we need to change around the interpersonal relationships through teams, through networking, through exploring outside the present environment and lastly we need lots of leadership.

It is often not appreciated how much an existing culture can hinder innovation, it can stop creativity. The very behaviours you previously valued for efficiency and effectiveness  now become the ones you want to change as they have suddenly become the roadblocks, and so  these must become the critical focal point to address.

One great description of successful innovation I like was from a research paper by Judge, back in 1997, that suggests “innovation as chaos within guidelines”.

Top management prescribes a set of goals but simply allow its personnel greater freedom within the context of these goals, perhaps it permits more time to explore and experiment and works on trying to stay out of the way on how it is pursued.

I like that, some are actually encouraging that already as part of their accepted culture. I’d add top management needs to clarify priorities, where it places the emphasis on new values that might shift, for example, into quality and growth impact potential rather than effectiveness and delivering quantity.

Equally there is a real need to explain any new attributes like agility, flexibility, freedom and cooperative teamwork. This goes well beyond  just announcing changes through offering flatter structures, greater autonomy and work team environments, but explaining clearly what it gives both the organization and the individual affected.

People need to hear and understand the reasons and rationale for why it sometimes needs radically altering the existing culture, maybe because of the profound changes in the market environment that this is required. Treat people as adults and they might behave more rational and ‘move’ to change because it is somewhere they would prefer to be.

Setting sail is different from being on a long journey

Many organizations certainly attempt to set this momentum in place but do they go far enough? Does the more establish culture strike back in unseen ways? Organizations have ‘host’ systems that release the ‘antibodies’ to counter the new attempts to alter it. It simply resists and as I said earlier, might shut down in many ways.

Managing culture that promotes innovation is complex; it is often left to chance, left to experiment, far too ad hoc in design and just exploring. We need to commit to a deeper approach, if we want to really change our culture to innovate. Unless the values, norms and beliefs are not clearly thought through and consistently reinforced initiatives to change simply die.

The question for management wanting innovation  is that they need to work through the determinants that encourage innovation and then set about communicating these and making them happen but this takes a lot of time and dedicated commitment.  Maybe we need an Innovation Culture Officer, certainly for a given time perhaps.

Where I think we need to change the game is thinking through three dimensions for shifting our thinking about culture and place the emphasis on building the needed competences of an organization in this century.

These come more from an Eastern view of the world to connect them but one has been discussed throughout the centuries.

Culture needs to think through three perspectives

The Outer Game: As open innovation gains more momentum for seeking value creation we are seeking more and more through external networks and relationships. This is changing and sometimes challenging culture within organizations. We need to figure out the outer game from the cultural perspective to enable innovation

The Inner Game: The more recognized place, within organizations. The interpersonal relationships are the place to look and build from. We need far more synergies, more dialogues beyond our normal ones. How do we place a growing emphasis on these?

The Secret Game: We are taught much in moral behaviours, about human nature that are partly inherent in our personal values. Today, in organizations we are sometimes confronted because these are often in conflict with different understandings of performance, more for ourselves as individuals, less for the community yet we still chose to live in but with growing reluctance. We are often keeping our true emotions hidden.

Many of our core values are not as ‘grounded’ as they use to be, we have allowed them to fray at the edges. Those values, norms and beliefs do need to be spelled out within organizations really well and followed through in the behaviour that mirrors them. Otherwise we do have secret games and in the long-term collective performance suffers. We do need to reduce the secret games that go on quietly within organizations.

Leadership is vital to managing cultural change.

Leaders who want innovation need to offer a positive, supportive environment where the attitudes, perspectives and beliefs are well articulated and communicated. Organization culture is a barrier or the enabler to innovation.

Asking people to change is not a one-off event, it is a constant, daily ‘grind’ but if you provide the right environment and enablers that innovation requires you can get a positive reaction and you then raise the cultural expectations that eventually makes the change needed for creating a culture for innovation.

Culture reflects the sum total of a way of life. It provides the patterns, the values, the traits and behaviours shared within an organization that can make or break innovation.

These cannot be touched but they can be felt. Culture has a profound influence on innovation’s success, it can’t be left to chance, it needs carefully designing and nourishing and this can only come from the top allowing it to grow in well thought-through and designed ways.

The post Fitting existing culture and innovation- no chance! first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.