CREATE A CULTURE OF INNOVATION

We believe that much of the conventional thinking about “creating” culture is deeply misguided. Culture is fundamentally a lagging variable, not a leading one. It is the result of a set of decisions, precedents, and supporting leadership behaviors around all aspects of organizational design, including strategy, structure, people, and processes.

From our experience, culture can in fact change rapidly, but only if management aligns the “hard” aspects of organizational change, including variables such as how:

• Ideas are sourced
• Opportunities are evaluated
• Risk is measured
• Success (and failure) are rewarded
• Initiatives are staffed
• Experiments are executed
• Commercialization is organized
• Learning is achieved

Given the fallacies noted above, we do not undertake engagements focused exclusively on culture change. Rather, we make cultural change an integral part of our other work on organizational effectiveness. These kinds of engagements are typically undertaken while looking at sourcing, shaping, or commercializing actual innovation opportunities, as developing new behaviors with real projects tends to have far more impact than making abstract recommendations.

Specific projects we may undertake in support of a broader cultural transformation include:

• Custom Workshops — these help to establish a common language around innovation and a baseline understanding of tools and techniques among the leaders and practitioners through an interactive learning environment.
• Create or Reshape Innovation Processes — a consulting effort focused on establishing the organizational design parameters and performance metrics required to enable innovative ideas to develop independent of the core business concerns.
• Balance Innovation Portfolios — a consulting effort aimed at helping companies first evaluate their current pipeline of ideas and innovations to ensure those with truly disruptive potential are given the resources required to succeed, and then second, formalize the evaluation models to maintain a healthy portfolio mix going forward.
• Measure Progress and Performance on Innovation — a consulting effort in which we work with the leadership team to identify appropriate leading indicators that can be applied to monitor innovation initiatives and development programs to minimize risk and maximize the yield from such explorations.