Building the Innovation Culture
Some Notes on Adaptation and Change in Network-Centric Organizations
by Bryan Coffman
Innovation has garnered more headlines recently as one of the core processes that every organization must nurture in order to retain its viability. Innovation in an organization goes beyond simply responding to change—it creates change in the environment that other organizations must respond to, and therefore can become a sustainable competitive advantage.
Many organizations employ a top down approach to innovation. Strategy is formulated at the top along with the major initiatives for achieving it. Some of these initiatives will be innovative in nature, related to the development of an innovative process, product or service. Top down approaches may solicit input from deeper in the organization, but the formulation of the innovative ideas remains at the top. Hybrid approaches create a structure in the middle of the organization that encourages innovations from the bottom up and works to shape them into viable business ideas.
The approach described in this paper focuses on encouraging a distributed network to form inside the organization that takes on the role of much of the innovation work. Individuals connected to the network generate their own ideas, conduct experiments, log the results, build support, and help transition some of the ideas to formal pilots or direct implementation. The network employs features from several different morphologies and uses some principles from natural selection to recombine and improve ideas throughout the process.
Contents
- Embracing and Resisting Change
- Foundation Work: Trust and Self-Reliance—the Soft Stuff
- Networks: The Structure of the Innovation Culture
- Network Morphology
- Types of Networks
- Network Design and Capabilities for the Innovation Culture
- The Core Process of the Innovation Culture
- Explore
- Try
- Test
- Adopt
- Documenting the Work
