There are seemingly so many intervention points it can get bewildering.

The innovation environment can be made-up of how well you collaborate and network, the level of the group and individual interactions, the presence and commitment of leadership towards innovation, as well as the organizational set-up and structures.

You can explore the make-up of the innovation environment in so many ways.

So what makes up the environment to innovation?

It is the culture, management and its people who have a mutual dependency. Culture can enhance or inhibit the tendencies to innovate, it certainly has a profound influence on the innovative capacity and provides the rich nutrients to nurture innovation or kill it. Culture has always been regarded as a primary determinant of innovation.

To foster innovation and its environment, key levels of management and individuals must be committed to creating an environment and culture that promotes creativity, be engaged and promote the ability to promote change in nimble, agile and flexible ways to meet changing conditions in the market place and with customers.

It is this creativity through the innovations that are flowing through the organization that often needs a critical focal point to create a change that has an impact.

Triggering stimuli for change

The job of any change initiative is to give stimuli in the actions, transactions and interactions in the pursuit of innovation. These come from changing practices but focusing on the critical interaction between people and the situations that delivering innovation demands.

Altering an organizations workplace environment comes from focusing on the person’s creativity and the organizations climate conditions to deliver on its innovation need.

From what I gather, there are over 40 different assessments you can use for creativity and innovation. Within the best known, most cited and researched two still stand out for me as tested and valuable. These have stood the test of time and I believe provide a great place to start assessing your climate and what motivates a more creative / innovative environment.

There are two climate assessments for creativity assessments that stand out

The first is the Climate for Creativity (KEYS) developed by Terisa Amabile and the other one is the Creative Climate questionnaire developed by Gören Ekvall. Both came out in the late nineties but seem to have stood that ‘famous’ test of time.

I have shown in Ekvall’s model a modified version introducing the split between the attitude for work and its five part make-up and work atmospheres five parts.

I’m going to focus more on Ekvall’s model as it is the one I have used more and it ‘feels’ more comfortable for me.

Amabile’s model contained 17 factors, whereas Ekvall’s model has only ten factors. There have been a number of comparative studies on these two. One argument being that less factors allows for a more open aspect but less controversial.

To be honest I like them both as they each have slightly different ways to look at creativity.

Firstly though, let me outline Amabile’s model.

It comprises three key elements: resources, management practices and organizational motivation. Each of these elements interacts with one another and has an impact on the resulting level of innovation.

In Amabile’s structure the assessment breaks answers down into two criteria of measuring current performance and seeking perceived importance and attributed 100 points per section to gauge relative importance using a simple Likert-type scale with anchor phrases at each extreme.

For her Organizational Motivation section, a questionnaire is broken down into

• 1) Explicit value of creativity,
• 2) Attitude to risk,
• 3) Pride in Employees,
• 4) Enthusiasm for Employees,
• 5) Forward-facing strategy and
• 6) Management systems.

Then for her Resources part:

• 1) Time to innovate,
• 2) Staff Expertise,
• 3) Access to Funds,
• 4) Material Resources,
• 5) Information Resources, and
• 7) Training

Then her Management Practices, it is broken down:

• 1) Project autonomy,
• 2) Team Selection – Skills,
• 3) Definition of Goals,
• 4) Supervisor Support and
• 5) Team Selection – Personality.

Ekvall’s model

Ekvall’s model was divided into two halves, each comprising five factors. This also allowed Ekvall’s model to be split over two pages, with the first entitled ‘atmosphere for work’, and the second entitled ‘attitude to work.’ Maybe this is why I like it for this defining split for deepening the conversation.

Again to use this you attribute 100 points per section to gauge relative importance using a simple Likert-type scale with anchor phrases at each extreme.

Organizational Climate for Creativity and Innovation (1996) is the article that sums up all of Ekvall’s research within organizational climate and creativity throughout the second half of the 20^th Century.

This was where Ekvall formalized his ten dimensions of creative climate (challenge, freedom, idea support, trust / openness, dynamism / liveliness, playfulness / humor, debates, conflicts, risk-taking, and idea time) as well as described the implications of the Creative Climate Questionnaire (CCQ).

The ten dimension factors from Ekvall’s creative climate questionnaire.

Attitude to Work dimensions

Idea Time: amount of time people can use (and do use) for elaborating new ideas. In the high idea-time situation, possibilities exist to discuss and test suggestions not included in the task assignment. There are opportunities to take the time to explore and develop new ideas. Flexible timelines permit people to explore new avenues and alternatives. In the reverse case, every minute is booked and specified. The time pressure makes thinking outside the instructions and planned routines impossible.

Risk-Taking: tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity in the workplace. In the high risk-taking case, bold initiatives can be taken even when the outcomes are unknown. People feel as though they can “take a gamble” on their ideas. People will often “go out on a limb” to put an idea forward. In a risk-avoiding climate there is a cautious, hesitant mentality. People try to be on the “safe side” and often “sleep on the matter.” They set up committees and they cover themselves in many ways.

Challenge and Involvement: degree to which people are involved in daily operations, long-term goals, and visions. When there is a high degree of challenge and involvement people feel motivated and committed to making contributions. The climate is dynamic, electric, and inspiring. People find joy and meaningfulness in their work. In the opposite situation, people are not engaged and feelings of alienation and apathy are present. Individuals lack interest in their work and interpersonal interactions are dull and listless.

Freedom: independence in behavior exerted by the people in the organization. In a climate with much freedom, people are given the autonomy and resources to define much of their work. They exercise discretion in their day-to-day activities. Individuals are provided the opportunity and take the initiative to acquire and share information about their work. In the opposite climate people work within strict guidelines and roles. They carry out their work in prescribed ways with little room to redefine their tasks.

Idea Time Support: ways new ideas are treated. In the supportive climate, ideas and suggestions are received in an attentive and professional way by bosses, peers, and subordinates. People listen to each other and encourage initiatives. Possibilities for trying out new ideas are created. The atmosphere is constructive and positive when considering new ideas. When idea support is low, the automatic “no” is prevailing. Fault-finding and obstacle-raising are the usual styles of responding to ideas.

Work Atmosphere dimensions.

Conflict:  presence of personal and emotional tensions in the organization. When the level of conflict is high, groups and individuals dislike and may even hate each other. The climate can be characterized by “interpersonal warfare.” Plots, traps, power and territory struggles are usual elements of organizational life.  Personal differences yield gossip and slander. In the opposite case, people behave in a more mature manner; they have psychological insight and control of impulses. People accept and deal effectively with diversity.

Debate: occurrence of encounters and disagreements between viewpoints, ideas, and differing experiences and knowledge. In the debating organization many voices are heard and people are keen on putting forward their ideas for consideration and review. People can often be seen discussing opposing opinions and sharing a diversity of perspectives. Where debate is missing, people follow authoritarian patterns without questioning them.

Playfulness/Humor: spontaneity and ease displayed within the workplace. A professional, yet relaxed atmosphere where good-natured jokes and laughter occur often is indicative of this dimension. People can be seen having fun at work. The climate is seen as easy-going and light-hearted. The opposite climate is characterized by gravity and seriousness. The atmosphere is stiff, gloomy and cumbrous. Jokes and laughter are regarded as improper and intolerable.

Trust/Openness: emotional safety in relationships. When there is a high degree of trust, individuals can be genuinely open and frank with one another. People count on each other for professional and personal support. People have a sincere respect for one another and give credit where credit is due. Where trust is missing, people are suspicious of each other, and therefore, they closely guard themselves, their plans, and their ideas. In these situations people find it extremely difficult to openly communicate with each other.

Dynamism / Liveliness: The eventfulness of life in the organization. In the highly dynamic situation, new things are happening all the time and new ways of thinking about and handling issues often occur. The atmosphere is lively and full of positive energy. There is a kind of psychological turbulence that is described by people in those organizations as “full speed”, “go,” “breakneck,” “maelstrom,” “and the like. People get caught up in the excitement and energy. The opposite situation could be compared to a slow jog-trot with no surprises. There are no new projects; no different plans. Everything goes its usual way.

Over the years the Ekvall questionnaire has been collected and benchmarked.

The value of seeing a significant part of an organization of 7,000 take this test and then be compared against others completing the CCQ can be valuable.

Taking one example between a group designated as innovation organizations against those regarded as stagnating would deliver a spider web visual showing the difference and where the gaps are to focus upon.

The discussion from producing such a view can become very telling. Of course this is a snapshot but it can become a powerful enabler to change. Improving the climate, over time changes the culture and conditions for how an organization views innovation.

Perceptions need to be broken down, clarity on a pathway forward navigated and negotiated with a leadership that is providing consistent and determined support so that the climate and conditions are constantly improving the environment for innovation – the culture learns to adapt and recognize this as the everyday ‘way of working.

Summary

There are many variables that influence people’s perception of the working environment and by focusing on understanding the climate and the possible potential to change this, in what it can provide the prime contributor to providing a huge impact within your innovation environment.

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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 Making an impact on an organization’s innovation environment first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The resources provide the lungs that give oxygen; they need to constantly be nurtured, too breathe and pump new life into the existing.

For innovation the same applies, we need to consistently build our innovative resources, they give delivery of the healthy living cells to promote and sustain us in new value potential.

The problem is we often are not very good at maintaining our resources and innovation activity. We just simply do not sustain our efforts, we tend to allow them to drift along or become lopsided from one individual team’s efforts, while the others simply ‘wallow’
Equally, organizations rarely set about designing the right conditions, working towards the innovation environment that ‘delivers’ a particular state of being, so as to allow something positive to happen, it is just expected to happen. Do we even bother to check for the real pulse of our innovation efforts?

My belief is if we do not have a constant working and reworking of these conditions we can’t honestly expect our organization to build the capacity, capability and competency we need for innovation to take hold, embed and becomes the long-term driver of the growth our organizations need and desire. We need to design a more sustaining effort

How do you develop the capacity to be exceptionally good every day? It is this constant focus on building the capabilities that matter, yet often we are not aware of those that significantly contribute, against those that are necessary to have or simply those that we need around to maintain what we have achieved.

Combining capability with capacity and competence becomes essential.

It is the combination effect of skills, organization abilities, processes and learning that combines to get things done. They individually and collectively impact performance.

Are organizations clear on what makes-up their core competencies? Do they constantly evaluate these within a consistent evolving set of changing market conditions or are they rather static, inwardly driven and not outwardly aware?

I have been working on for some time –actually it seems for ever- on a framework that separates the static needs of working innovation with the more dynamic ones that make the difference and provide the abilities to turn every-day activity into more distinctive, breakthrough, radical or disruptive innovation outcomes.

This work-in-progress I keep building upon,can be explored on a dedicated web site of www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com.

We do need to plan a capability maturing pathway so as to move our capabilities and competencies through from often a current ad-hoc state.

We need to turn these into a more formalized and predictive, planned out state, which brings a more integrated approach so as to extract any synergies but allows for a decent level of autonomy to grow individuals, yet build teams that constantly ‘form’ and reform to tackle the challenges the innovation opportunity presents to bring those to successful fruition in better ways.

Organizations seem not to learn from common mistakes
The amount of inconsistency in innovation (fits and starts) ,the turning off and on holds the building of our capabilities and competencies to innovate continuously back.

We do need to have a consistent, well-thought through plan for innovation development within organizations that is a resource development plan that has its distinct budgets, plans and dedicated group that is accountable to deliver on these plans, updated like all others within the normal planning cycles of the organization.

Innovation needs to be central within the new business core

When are we going to recognize that innovation should be a real core of our organization’s makeup? I wrote a three part series about “moving innovation into our core” (here, here and here)

I concluded with the emphasis on technology within all our organizations that we are in need of a radical newly designed Enterprise-wide innovation process. One that is embracing and adapting constantly to all we have been learning about how innovation works and what technology, digital, networks, relationships and social streaming brings that all need to be fully integrated within this redesign.

Innovation requires increasing agility, flexibility and allowing creativity to flourish on a constant, evolving basis. Today, innovation often stays outside the mainstream system and operational structures, often to it’s and the organizations detriment. as it is seen as something that does not fit the ‘norm’. This is today’s innovation problem

Innovation needs to be fluid, open, responsive; sometimes reliant on the instinct, hunch or powerful insight that is never ‘predictable’ but suddenly emerges from a collision of events, or random thoughts that lead to a new insight, a game changing one. It is really hard to turn this ‘randomness’ or serendipity into a system but certainly not impossible.

How are we going to design our innovation capabilities, competencies or capacity unless we fully recognize the dramatic changes in business that are now underway and what this needs to be addressed, to allow for a more responsive, fluid, agile and adaptive culture, to flourish and respond so as to generate the better innovation of the future we need.

Recognizing differences
There are real differences when it comes to building innovation understanding and equipping your organization to perform at improved levels. There are different traits, actions and activities to think through.

Here are some of the needs:

* We need to build far more serendipity into what we do, also random connections, as well as purposeful discovery, by seeking out increasing connections and engaging in networks of learning and mutual exchange.

Places where we are turning curiosity into reality and building our innovative mental abilities for growth, development and accomplishment, opening up and being receptive and then translating this into new innovation.

* We need to embed into our new innovation core new routines and thinking. It is determining the changes needed by those new combinations of fusion by seeking out the chemistry from all the connections and exchanges, pushing for creative collisions, positive tensions and dynamics to engage fully in innovation, so the culture, climate and environment are vibrant, challenging and exciting.

* We need to constantly seeking the new space from knowledge exploitation and exploration, redefining the organization edges, enlarging and enhancing our understanding, pushing constantly out, constantly evaluating, discovering and aligning growth options and then seeking out those outcomes that potentially offer the right return on innovation

* We need to place learning into the centre, to allow our capability building, new competencies to grow and evolve. We focus on the constant need to provide the mechanisms so as to improved performance and capacities by focusing on both our mental and physical abilities to our position and function to explore and exploit. Each contributes to our ability to receive, hold and absorb new knowledge. We measure these by the increased volume and quality outcomes

* We need new structures, attitudes, investment and motivation to change, to focus on innovation building that needs instilling and coming from the top, not just as a commitment that must happen but integrated and aligned into the strategic thinking and planning, worked through a clear pathway of change to achieve a different, core innovation capability..

* We need to determine the abilities to deliver in effective, focused, efficient and aligned ways. Knowing what is important, seeking out the actions to support and deliver the part needed to achieve the desired goals. Adjusting as we go, as we learn, ramping up what is working, dampening down what is clearly not.

* We need to build innovation by working it continuously,  on making our environment into this more evolving and dynamic one, where the climate and culture of innovation thrive and grows from this constant feeding and attention.

In summary
The more we focus specifically on what makes up our innovation competencies, capabilities and capacities, delivering the dynamic ones that give innovation impact,  the more we are able to comprehend what is important, produce added value and transform from what we have known into what we can see differently, opens us up more into the world of innovation possibilities..

It is developing the skill, knowledge and ability (or capability, capacity and competence) for innovation to deliver on its promise to sustain, grow and provide new value-adding outcomes that take the organization forward and it can no longer be haphazard but systematic and purposeful.

The post Delivering the innovation core: building capability, capacity and competency. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We certainly need to find better ways to encourage and obtain a higher commitment to our approaches to building ‘culture’ and all it covers in our thinking if we want to really have innovation deliver on its potential.

Unless the values, norms and beliefs are not clearly thought-through and consistently reinforced daily through a consistent flow of initiatives to change, to explore, to learn from, any movement can simply wither and die from this lack of ‘total’ dedication.

The question we need to ask of our management is this: “if you are wanting innovation then we all need to work through the determinants that encourage innovation together” and then set about communicating these that are highly valued and expected throughout the organization, so as to encourage them to support and make innovation happen.
A certain commitment and a lack of patience
The issue is this can take a lot of time and dedicated commitment and sadly, management lack both patience and often that commitment to “seeing it fully through”, they seem to get side tracked and move onto the next thing.

I feel management is sometimes like grazing nomadic animals looking constantly for fresher grass, impatient for the green shoots that are appearing from their sporadic grazing. They have no patience for lasting cultivation.

Maybe we need an Innovation & Culture Officer, even just for a given time perhaps, or we mandate the human resource group to allocate clear dedicated resources for a significant time exclusively on understanding climates factors and then setting about creating the culture to innovate with the board’s complete backing.

Leaders have to set the style they want from an innovating culture
Leaders are in the best position to create the environment that determines the culture and from this comes innovations end result, the outcome they desire.

Too little time is spent by leaders on thinking deeply about what type of environment they want, what type of culture they need, often it is left to chance, to others to evolve not by design but by chance and personal interpretation. How wrong.

Leaders who want innovation need to offer a positive, supportive environment where the attitudes, perspectives and beliefs are well articulated and communicated. 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.

These raised expectations eventually translate into making the change needed for creating a culture for innovation. Organization culture is either a barrier or the real enabler to innovation, for it to come to life and thrive.

Offering the sum total

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. It clarifies what is possible, tolerates and allows for experimentation, for trials, for learning to take place.

It creates an environment where trust can grow and confidence is channelled more and more into innovation experimentation, engagement and exploration.

Culture has the most 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.

This climate being built often cannot be touched yet the actions can be felt in multiple ways to promote that environment where innovation flourishes.

Fostering the right climate is critical

The fostering of the environment, the building of the culture to pursue innovation mean different things to different people. Changing the environment has a great chance of changing people’s behaviour.

A systematic planting of  ‘new seeds’ will eventually ‘yield’ an innovative result that ‘feeds’ off of this new culture that can multiply and replicate. Yet it does take this concerted and dedicated time and effort to constantly explore, adapt and amend as it is actually a ‘living culture’ that needs constant feeding and nurturing.

It means providing the space to stimulate; a place to promote fresh thinking so the generating of new ideas is managed in a place that fosters interaction and collaboration. An innovation environment is made up of creating a positive atmosphere to encourage and nurture, to reflect and learn from failures that will inevitably happen.

You need to link and communicate, to offer a place where it is the ‘norm’ to challenge, to explore multiple sources of ideas, to provide a process and guiding set of procedures to capture and translate different thinking.

A place where multiple interactions and connections occur so as to make innovation real and effective by providing the right environment and conditions to explore and extract.

Connecting culture to innovation makes it potentially highly touchable.
Culture runs through everything we do when we engage. We can ‘feel’ culture yet we can’t touch ‘it’ yet it always touches us in so many ways. Innovation on the other hand we can touch, we can see, we can strongly relate too, it becomes tangible when it moves from an idea into the realm of reality as ‘new’ to the world.

When you combine culture and innovation in the right ways it becomes a very powerful force that transforms and prevails, it mobilizes and can galvanize us to great things.

It is when culture offers us a more creative environment, one that gives us a greater security than one based on living in fear and insecurity we grow in confidence, we open up our minds to increasing possibilities, we want to learn and experience and these matter to innovations ultimate success.

Innovation takes on a powerful identity from its cultural roots that transform attitudes into actions that then become those eventual outcomes we look for in what we do – greatness in our innovation efforts – that can be seen, valued and held up for others to admire.

The post Determining our culture governs the greatness within our innovation efforts. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.