Best Practices in Fostering and Maintaining a Culture of Innovation

Mike Ginsberg

CEOs, Boards of Directors and executives alike are challenged to drive revenue growth and expand business opportunities. In his recent book, Harvesting Intangible Assets, Andrew Sherman addresses strategies to jumpstart our tepid economy by driving new revenue streams and market opportunities from our intellectual properties. A good friend of mine and a Partner in the Washington, D.C. law office of Jones Day, he is recognized as an international authority on the legal and strategic issues affecting small and growing companies.  He is a prolific book writer on the legal and strategic aspects of business growth and capital formation.

Over the years, Andrew developed and observed a wide variety of best practices for fostering and establishing, on a sustainable basis, a genuine culture of innovation which he shares in his latest writings.

Last month, we posted the first half of his best practices. The second half of his strategies are listed below.

6. Blaze new trails. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Do not go where the path may lead, instead go where there is no path at all and leave a trail.” Emerson understood the core precepts of innovation. It is not just the willingness to travel where no one has gone before; it is the value added by creating a new trail that others can follow. Trailblazing is not just about the process of discovery; it is about the outputs of invention. Edison was guided by this principle in all of his toils in the laboratory and his bold willingness to defy convention in order to accomplish invention.

7. Trust in yourself and your coworkers. People don’t innovate without self-confidence, and teams can’t perform without trust. Trust in your ability to make a significant contribution in your own way to your organization, and trust in your team and the system to respect and embrace your contributions. Trust must exist at the peer-to-peer level, at the cross-departmental level, and at the supervisor-subordinate level. Nothing is more inspiring than praise that is earned and the feeling that those who evaluate your performance believe deeply in the quality and integrity of your work. Trust is a type of fuel and an empowering and liberating energy force that inspires creativity and innovation.

8. Empower people to let down their guards. Nobody can innovate while putting out fires or living in the present tense. Innovation by its very nature requires conditions where team members can clear away enough of the muck on their daily windshields to sense and explore new possibilities and envision new realities. There must be a “safe” environment where the outputs of the visioning can be exposed, explored, and discussed without ridicule or too much negativity. Once the idea has been massaged, shaped, and restated, the more burdensome tasks of execution, adoption, and sustainability begin. Participants in the process must understand the critical differences between simple ideation or invention and the more complex tasks of sustainable innovation and value creation, but you can’t have one without the other.

9. Hey, who interrupted my disruption? Sometimes creativity and innovation can grow within the four walls of an organization over a long period of time on a gradual basis. But, in most cases, they need to be jumpstarted by an executive at a high level who is not afraid to disrupt or creatively destroy the culture and the status quo. The change can be radical or transformational or just a reset and reboot of top priorities and budget allocations and reward systems. But, like all momentum, pauses, fits, and starts or any other interruption to the disruption can derail the disruption, and, with CEOs and leaders playing musical chairs on what seems like a constant basis, it has been challenging for those responsible for innovation to determine a clear direction or gain any real innovation momentum.

10. World Series are won with singles and doubles. Baseball historians will explain that, as exciting as home runs may be to watch from the fans’ seats, most batting titles, RBI leaders, and World Series team winners are determined by the nine men who can consistently hit singles and doubles, especially at clutch points in the game when runners are in scoring positions. The same holds true for innovation. Many CEOs swing for the fences with the hopes of breakthrough innovation, but most innovative growth companies succeed through lots of smaller projects and incremental innovations. CEOs must be careful not to demonstrate or marginalize those who are working on hitting singles and doubles; that will only frustrate the process and virtually ensure that no games are won.