Innovation cultures, Are these a myth? The view from half way up

Which comes first, Innovation or culture, is an old question. Do you need to have an innovation culture inbuilt within an organisation for it to be innovative? Or do you have to have innovation first to establish a vibrant organisational culture?

The problem to start off with is that we use this phrase innovative ‘culture’ very loosely.  It seems many to, at least, allude to, a place that has that warm fuzzy feeling, where one we can wing it,  suggest wacky ideas, take risks. It's fab here, come i on the water's lovely. However the real experience is that, at the very best, this type culture, the one all the CEO's wish we had of  only applies to a few like minded souls in any organisation anyway. Just having a culture, any culture, that is overlaid on existing assumptions values and experiences is very, very hard to achieve.  Some may say it's unrealistic. We can’t all be Willy Wonk.


Because the simple and big problem we face in any multi-person environment is that not everyone will buy into it anyway. and worse, some become active antagonistics towards it.

So how do you get innovation embedded into your organisation? Can it be done.? Yes it can. Here is another view. Maybe its semantics but I'd like to replace the word 'Culture' with another one.

The idea that 'culture' begats innovation is missing a more fundamental point and it is a bit of a red herring. It firstly assumes  that ideas grow because they have a culture? I'm not sure that's a valid cause and effect. They do because, if you look at it more closely, they get access to a network.  A network that will trash, thrash or bash ideas about;  polish, tweak and improve, often over months or years, without necessarily any process or control and that network importantly isn't necessarily just internal.


There is absolutely nothing new in this idea at all. The coffee shops of C17th Britain, the Lunatics, Renaissance Italy, Silicon Valley,  were all simply networks connecting to both internal and external sources.  It's not so much of a culture, more of the access to a network that lets ideas grow. One very important side point is not all innovations are initially market lead, and they shouldn’t be.  These historical networks prove that beyond doubt. They came up with ideas just for the hell of it.  I don’t think Darwin was looking at the IP rights!  

Just to give you a real life example of what i mean by network rather than culture. For two years now I've have been working, helping small and new start businesses figure out how to tell their story. We have a network of over 200 businesses in our tribe now. Most of the time what we do is not provide practical help, like how to write the copy, or what their web site should actually be saying, which is what we do the rat of the week, but often simple sanity checking. People within that tribe contribute to simply help out, with no direct advantage to their own bottom line; but by doing so get energy and input for their own ideas to develop. We have, accidentally  I have to admit, created an environment,  a density of network connections and opportunities for ideas to grow and flourish, to reproduce, to be killed off, to replenish. We have in effect an ecosystem, not a culture. And the major benefit is that working for Free on Fridays has made a subtle but nevertheless huge difference in the way I personally look at how to improve my innovation skills and our own products and services.

So, I prefer the idea of 'developing the network' than a culture. It makes a bit more sense to me and I am a simple soul. In purely pragmatic considerations it has achievable, definable ( and measurable) goals which keeps the bean counters happy. Changing a company's culture is way more scary than building a network, and virtually impossible if you already have inherited any 'culture' embedded beaviours.  Like any Local Government or a Health Trust or any Quango. 25 years in Change Management have shown me that it is largely a myth anyway. ( I can hear the sound of an army of consultants spinning in their expense accounts)   Evolution is a much better description, and that is initiated only by improving the storytelling skills and opportunities (Networks) for people to communicate. Hiking up the bandwidth for all types of internal and external communication increases exponentially the level of innovation in any organisation, be it a one man band solotrepreneur or a government department.

For any organisation you can only expect a small proportion of your work force to buy into the innovative principles and actions anyway and win their willing collaboration. One alternative could be in establishing sub-cultures like Lockheed’s Skunkworks, which has to function almost as a separate entity within an organisation or it gets strangled at birth, largely by bureaucracy or people protecting their job descriptions. But on the whole, the innovative cultures we would like to be working in and strive for, such as Apple, Google, Ideo and I'd humbly suggest  my own company, were all developed from the luxury of the position of a blank price of  paper, on which active innovation was a watermark and people are recruited who fitted that persona.  None of us had any legacy of unionisation, hierarchical management, inconsistent management, and communications skills that don't actually communicate anything, and all those preconceived ideas which we first have to overcome before we can even talk about being ‘Innovative’.

So, look at your network of communication, on line, off line, internally, externally with your customers, with your suppliers. Make water coolers spaces bigger, with seats! Give people time to talk

It's not necessarily about the link between culture and innovation, but communication which leads to innovation.  It's not about risk free, 'can do' cultures. You just won’t get them, not matter how hard you try. The challenge we face is that 'Everyone wants to change but nobody wants to change themselves' But, build your network of sharing, internally and externally an then you get ideas and innovation, and the rest of the work force, at least those that  have something to contribute. get dragged in when they see how much fun it can be.

It’s just my view.