Culture Doesn’t Have to Kill Innovation

Anyone who has tried knows that one of the hardest thing is to make an old culture embrace innovation. It's like infusing your body with a virus and telling your auto immune system to just back down from trying to suppress it. It's almost against nature.

One of the reasons why it's so hard for a lot of organizations is that innovation lives at the edges. Even though progress has been made over the last few years, innovation is still up to separate teams of passionate dreamers, who usually bang their heads against the wall once their ideas for new initiatives or new ways of doing things clash with the existing culture.

A way to address this and stop it from happening is to make it less scary and more transparent what innovation is about. It's about opening up the processes, decipher a lot of the 'hoopla' about it and make it very concrete, meaningful and something in which everybody in the organization has a role to play.

It's about applying new, simple models for innovation and business development that allows the organization to work with innovation and improvement in a structured, well thought-through manner while making each individual task associated with it totally transparent and banal.

Have an assumption about how something works? Great! Test it. Set up a hypothesis that allows itself to be easily tested in the market. Do the test, gather the feedback and see if the hypothesis was proved. If yes, then great - now move on to the next test. If not, do a new hypothesis, a new test, a new report and so on and so on. That's about how simple it is to do innovation in a structured, transparent way.

Anybody can do it. Which is what makes it hard. Because where do you start? The most obvious things often require something with experience and insight to step in and act as a midwife in order to get you going.

Luckily that's exactly what I do. Let's talk if you recognize the pain of trying without really getting there.

Photo: Flickr/Simon Brown