Burdon, S., & Dovey, K.A. (2015), Exploring the cultural basis of innovation, Journal of Innovation Management, 3(3), 20-34.
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Key insights :
1. Companies must consider the leadership’s strategic intent to innovate as a precursor to culture creation/transformation. This means that it is the leadership’s role to influence the culture of the organization what will foster innovation.
2. The culture is specific to any organization, it is driven by the leaders within the organization in a top-down dynamic. However, we can see that this model of cultural implementation does not create a framework conducive to innovation. On the opposite we know that collectively-reflexive action is critical to foster innovative realisation within organization. The culture is linked to the structure of the company, both influence deeply each other, and mutually reinforce and coevolve. For that to be optimal, Culture and strategy must be aligned.
Implications :
1. Managers should implement matching processes so that, employees’ mindset matches with the company’s culture (i.e., shared the same values, assumptions and norms). For this, they could ask, during hiring processes, to a candidate to fill a survey and see if the latter fits with the company’s culture. For instance, the website companymatch.me provides that kind of survey for many companies (e.g., Deloitte). The higher your percentage is (related to the company), the more likely you will fit to their culture. To illustrate this, Randstad used this website for their project « CEO for one month », to apply, you needed to fill the survey first.
2. Performance management should be more focus on the assessment of the well-being of employees and the organizational environment than on the results only. Indeed, it seems logic to assess managers on those characteristics as they are responsible for the people who (will provide the results) and the environment. Therefore, the assessment could enable the shaping of a better environment/culture which could induce innovation. For instance, Deloitte is trying to assess managers more and more on the well-being of employees which, according to studies, would start with more flexible hours.
3. Conference OR open-meetings. Employees often focus only on achieving individual objectives and lose sight of the company’s main purpose and vision. A good leader is someone who can align every worker through the same objectives so that they go in the same direction. Conference or better open-meetings (one or the other depending on the structure of the company) led by manager should be an interesting way to communicate the upcoming objectives, be sure the culture of the company is well understood and all the employee are motivated. Being transparent in this meeting session and involve workers in the decision making is a way to foster a good feeling of belonging to the enterprise and its culture.
Limitations :
1. They can miss some talents because of their culture-focused recruitment whereas these talents could bring them value and a new vision of things.
2. Conflicts of interest could arise between the organisation and the shareholders. They might be not on the same page anymore. The organization being more employee-oriented and for their part, shareholders being more results-oriented
Further references:
1. Brian Leavy, (2005). A leader’s guide to creating an innovation culture, Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 33 Issue: 4, pp. 38-45. → Tools given to leaders to allow them to “find the right balance between corporate creativity and efficiency in order to turn innovation into commercial reality.”
2. McLaughlin, Patrick & Bessant, John & Smart, Palie, (2008). Developing an organisation culture to facilitate radical innovation, International Journal of Technology Management – INT J TECHNOL MANAGE. 44. 10.1504/IJTM.2008.021041. → The fact that culture can also help to implement radical innovation.
3. S. Sinek, (2016), Most leaders don’t even know the game they are in. Online : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyTQ5-SQYTo , consulted on the 28 april 2019. → The explanation by Simon Sinek how a good leader reaches to inspire people and take the best of them. A very interesting talk to learn how to create a culture that helps innovation.
Jassawalla, A.R., & Sashittal, H.C. (2002). Cultures that support product-innovation processes. The Academy of Management Executive, 16(3), 42-54.
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This paper analyses and compares the different settings that contribute to an innovation-supportive corporate culture. In order to do that, this article took into consideration examples of low innovation-supportive culture organizations and high innovation-supportive culture organizations.
From this paper, to get a highly innovation-supportive culture an organization should generally set a special team for an innovation project, the leaders should not have only technical skills but interpersonal skills as well, the organization’s hierarchical structure should be flattening, it stands an importance of openness, trust, early involvement of all participants in new product decision-making, and the emphasis on intense information sharing. Some social rituals need to be taken into consideration. Indeed, an intensive schedule of formal meetings for sharing information, exchanging and developing ideas, expressing disagreement, and managing conflict are the most common rituals in highly innovation-supportive cultures. There are also special workshops that are given to improve the human-interactions skills of participants.
Regarding low innovation-supportive cultures that stands in other organizations, people involved are generally more individualistic, competitive and engaged in accusations and « finger-pointing ». Furthermore, team leaders tend to be mindlessness and suborned and the R&D department does not really work in parallel with the others. Social rituals stand in the fact here that there are only a few sustainable improvements in thinking, learning, or doing in that kind of company’s culture. In low innovation-supportive cultures, the new-product process is highly ritualistic in form but not in substance: there are workshops and meetings but it is imposed by the dominant team and people usually don’t have time in their respective agenda to learn from other field, and to be really involved in that kind of process.
Let’s now focus on some managerial implications and limitations of this paper.
First, according to this article, organizations with highly innovation-supportive culture should encourage their employees to come up with new ideas. A managerial implication of this is that a dedicated process should be integrated inside the organization and would allow any employees to develop and submit innovative ideas. It implies to define and implement a submission process, and evaluation and reward process, some coaching sessions for example to help the person to present and pitch his idea, an implementation process and feedback sessions in order to avoid frustration for the employees whose ideas have been rejected. Most of the time, these initiatives don’t have direct effect on corporate economics but they generally have strong positive effects on internal “atmosphere” and external reputation.
Secondly, according to this article, in highly innovation-supportive culture, it is important to reduce as much as possible the distance (both spatial and perceptual) among participants. A managerial implication of this is that, when creating a new organizational structure doing new things (such as new business unit or new department), this new entity shouldn’t be too distant from the organization otherwise some risks might appear such as some lack of communication with the other entities of the company, a non-access to the resources of the company, … A limitation here is that the article tends to affirm that minimizing the distance is the solution. But, in reality in this example, the challenge is to find the right trade-off between not too far but also not too close because otherwise it is useless to create a new entity. This new entity should keep a minimal distance in order to be independent and be able to work on doing new things with a certain autonomy. To take an example that we’ve seen few months ago, Agile Management is a method of management in which the Management doesn’t interrupt the team during a work cycle. We may easily imagine that it could more easily apply if this team benefits from a certain distance that would provide them some autonomy.
A last managerial implication is about knowledge sharing inside the firm. Indeed, in this paper, it is highlighted that organizations’ leaders are called to manage the intense interactions between participants’ tacit and explicit knowledge. Some tools can be managed inside the organization in order to share this knowledge as an intranet, internal online social networks, internal Wikis or other Groupware tools that help people work together collectively while located remotely from each other. A limitation here is that they can first be a real challenge for the IT to manage. Indeed, everyone is putting data and information. These networks therefore require a full-time IT staff to maintain them, keep them organized and also to deal with the problems as they arise.
Other References:
Loop, D. (2011). How to create a culture that supports innovation? Innovation Management. Retrieved from http://www.cipoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/1102_How-to-create-a-culture-that-supports-innovation.pdf
Rao, J., Weintraub, J. (2013). How Innovative is your company’s culture. MIT Sloan Management Review. Retrieved from https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-innovative-is-your-companys-culture/
Show lessMarc de Jong, Nathan Marston, and Erik Roth (April 2015).
The eight essentials of innovation - McKinsey Quarterly.
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This paper identifies eight essential attributes that are present, in part or in full, in every innovative company. These eight practices and processes, which enable the companies to structure, organize and encourage innovation, can be gathered in two groups.
First, we have four strategic and creative essentials that allow to determine under which conditions and terms innovation is more likely to thrive. The first step towards innovation is to aspire by establishing a quantitative innovation aspiration. This means that it should define, but also communicate, a clear tangible objective. Then, the company must choose between its different opportunities to have “a coherent, time- and risk-balanced portfolio of initiatives with enough resources to win”. Innovation also requires the company to discover new business, market and technology insights in order to build value propositions and to differentiate from the competition. Finally, a company must be able to evolve and adopt new business models, before the evolution of technology forces them to do so.
Second, we have four essentials that focus on building a sustainable innovation policy, while contributing to the performance. Firms need to accelerate and thus launch their innovations quicker the competition. To do so, they need a good functional collaboration. It is also important to identify the right scale at which the project should be launched in the relevant markets. Moreover, to access new insights, have new ideas and better reach the market, a company might turn to external collaborators and extend its network. Finally, knowing how to mobilize its workforce is key to a successful innovation process.
— Managerial implications —
The first managerial implication is linked to the choice: it is important to put more funding on a smaller amount of ideas than funding many projects with small funding for each. Indeed, usually firms have a lot of ideas but do not invest enough in them in order to use and implement those ideas. But the limit resides in the fact that if the company ends up investing in the wrong projects, it could put the firm in a bad position, both financially and towards its competition.
The second managerial implication is linked to acceleration: the manager should pay attention not to overwhelm innovation with paperwork and bureaucratic work because this will slow down the launching process. It is important to rush the innovation on the market in order to maximise the market shares. But there is a limit: a balance between autonomy and organisational structure should be found. Indeed, if you give too much autonomy regarding the process of paperwork, there may be an issue when the new innovation has to fit with the global organisation. People inside the company might also not understand the favourite treatment. Never forget that most people who are climbing mountain are not dying at the top but when they come down.
The third managerial implication regards the all model. These 8 essentials, taken together, should help big companies understand what they lack and/or must change to foster innovation. Companies should use those 8 essentials as a dashboard to see where their innovative problems reside. The limit of this implication is that those 8 essentials will not tell the company which innovation projects will be good for the company’s performance. This is merely just a set of questions. This is why it’s important for companies to keep these essentials in mind, without only relying on those elements.
— New sources identified —
• The first article will give more information about the process of how companies choose between the different opportunities available. It explains how the innovation pipeline works with the selection of the promising ideas through the process.
Muller, A., Valikangas, L. & Merlyn, P. (2005). Metric for innovation: guidelines for developing a customized suite of innovation metrics. Strategy & Leadership, 33(1), 37-45.
• We have seen that bureaucracy can slow down the launching process and disable the company to deal efficiently with innovation. The second article explains that there are actually two types of bureaucracy: enabling and coercive. Each type, impacting the innovation process differently.
Adler, P. & Borys B. (1996). Two Types of Bureaucracy: Enabling and Coercive. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(1), 61-89.
• The last article analyzes the inter-organizational collaboration in the innovation process of companies. While such networks can foster innovation in a company, it is interesting to understand the moderators and limits of leveraging these external sources of innovation.
West, J. & Bogers, M. (2014). Leveraging External Sources of Innovation: A Review of Research on Open Innovation. The journal of product innovation management, 31(4), 814-831.
Hansen, M. T., & Nohria, N. (2004). How to build collaborative advantage. MIT Sloan Management Review, 46(1), 22.
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This paper from Hansen and Nohria is an analysis of collaboration in multinational corporations. First they sought to uncover when and how collaboration should take place, then what were the barriers the companies could face and finally how to promote collaboration despite those possible barriers.
In the first part of this paper, the authors examined the situations where increased collaboration is required. They found that in some case collaboration was taking place only for its own sake while the benefits of the implementation were lower than the costs.
Then the authors gave some examples of collaboration in multinational companies and several solutions to promote collaboration within the company.
There are four limitations to the corporate collaborative behaviour depicted in this article. But while all four barriers to collaboration may be high in some multinationals, other companies face only one or two.
The first Barrier is the unwillingness To Seek Input and Learn from Others. For different reasons, some employees do not want to help others. Sometimes it is the norms in the unit that forces them to solve the problem themselves. In other cases, the reward systems can give more credit for individual heroic efforts. Some employees may simply believe that others have nothing to teach them. They may have developed the syndrome called “group bias”, in which they overvalue their own group and undervalue non-members.
The second barrier: Inability to Seek and Find Expertise. This barrier is a significant barrier to collaboration, somewhere in the company someone often knows the answer to a problem, but it is nearly impossible to connect the person who has the expertise with the person who needs it. The electronic search engine and the database can help for this issue. The transparent benchmarking systems can also help.
The third barrier is as called in the text an “unwillingness to help”, a limitation highly problematic especially in investment banks. A resolution was found by forcing the managers to demonstrate not only their own achievements but also their contributions and dedications to their peers. The seek of a promotion by managers was then a incentive so big cooperation increased as well.
The last barrier was the inability to work together and transfer knowledge. This barrier results from a communication barrier that could be simply avoided by increasing the working relationships with managers through diverse activities as team buildings,etc.
Depending on the nature of the problem, the company can develop a different connection, use the electronic yellow pages or develop a benchmark system (in case of difficulty to find help). On the other hand, the company can develop strong professional relationships between different employees or develop a formal cross-unit group and committee to promote different interactions (in case there are difficulties working together to transfer knowledge)
To conclude, we must pay attention to the exaggerated collaboration, for example, when there is a lot of cross unit network. Indeed, too much collaboration can lead to wasted time and unproductivity. In order to avoid unproductive collaboration, the company may decide to reduce the number of networks, limit inter-unit meetings or clearly define the objectives that each employee must achieve.
Appendix
Further references :
McGuire, Michael. “Collaborative public management: Assessing what we know and how we know it.” Public administration review 66.s1 (2006): 33-43.
Goman, C. (2014, February 10). Collaboration Research. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_qdwO3O2CM
Shalley, C. E., Zhou, J., & Oldham, G. R. (2004). The effects of personal and contextual characteristics on creativity: Where should we go from here?
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– Key Insights –
Each contextual characteristic affects creativity via its effect on employees’ intrinsic motivation. Creativity at work is influenced by:
1. Personal characteristics
a. Personality of people
i. Creative Personality Scale : assess creativity (with a score)
ii. Five Factor Model (stable over time): neuroticism; agreeableness; conscientiousness; extraversion; openness
to experience.
b. Cognitive style of people
i. Adaption-Innovation theory : adaptive style (adapters solve problems with gives procedures without
questioning their validity) vs innovative style (innovators solve problems by taking the risk of changing the
way people usually solve the problem and they develop solutions which are different).
As managers don’t have an impact on these characteristics, we will focus on contextual characteristics and
interactions..
2. Contextual characteristics : all dimensions of work that may have an influence on employees’ creativity and that
are not part of the individual. According to the Cognitive Evaluation theory, contextual factors have an
informational aspect and a controlling aspect. The informational aspect is in favor of creativity, the controlling
aspect is against creativity.
3. Interactions : contextual characteristics may interact with individuals’ personal characteristics or with other
contextual characteristics to affect creativity.
– Managerial implications and limitations –
7 external aspects were studied, 4 of them are decisive, 1 is discussed.
a. Job complexity : Complexity of a job is positively linked with creativity
1. Try to increase the complexity of the jobs by :
a. increase the autonomy : employees feel they are responsible-accountable for their job and its outcomes,
b. provide feedback : during the work and at the outcome,
c. significance of the tasks performed : the employee feels his job is meaningful/useful to the organization. Job in
line with vision/mission/objectives.
d. identity : for each task, a responsible person is known.
e. variety of the tasks performed : Activation Theory (Hackman, 1980) : when the job is repetitive and decreases
attention, the level of activation of the individual decreases and he is less likely to feel intrinsic motivation,
and developing creative ideas.
–> Limitation: Increase the complexity to a certain extent : some people can’t manage autonomy or variety of tasks.
b. Relationship with supervisors : Supportive supervisors enhance creativity where controlling ones are decreasing it. The relationship with supervisors is crucial because the leadership style will define the type of management applied in the organization..
—> Limitation: Different vision between supervisors and employees could lead to misunderstanding of the goals and objectives of the company.
c. Rewards: Rewarding is boosting creativity when there is recognition
1. Develop new ways of rewarding : preferring congratulations, showing recognition, encouraging, giving support for personal projects, provide individual consideration,…
2. Rewarding according to the needs of the employee : some people need public rewarding, others get controlled by public rewarding because they become dependent to public recognition.
–> Limitation : The question is : which reward to give to who for what? People could compare their privileges and so giving monetary value their efforts. It could maybe lead people to work only in exchange for reward.
d. Evaluation: Developmental evaluation is good, compared to judgmental evaluation.
1. Learn to give effective and supportive (=developmental) and informational feedback, in order to make employees develop their skills
2. When no expectation to be judged, creativity increases. -> Sometimes, do not say there will be an evaluation, so they don’t expect to be judged at work.
—> Limitation : Giving an effective feedback may be difficult. Feedback should be adapted according to the type of personality of the people you review. Some people need formal/informal feedback, etc.
e. Spatial configuration of work settings : Individuals shouldn’t be bothered with unexpected intrusions, which distract them from the work and diminishes creativity
1. Accommodate some workplaces to reduce the density and prevent from distractions (install physical boundaries for individuals not to be disrupted by other employees or noise)
–> Limitation : Allocating sufficient conditions to employees not be distracted may be impossible for smaller firms.
– Global limitations –
Interactions between personal and contextual characteristics or interaction between two or more contextual characteristics may affect creativity -> inconsistent results are possible. Creative people need to people who are more with both feet on the ground to concretize their ideas in a business way.
Definition of creativity :
– Remind that creativity is not equal to innovation
– Problem with the measurement of creativity : how can you “rate” ideas? Measured by the supervisor or by the employee himself? Still need research on this
– Further references –
Plucker, J. A., & Makel, M. C. (2010). Assessment of creativity. The Cambridge handbook of creativity, 48-73.
→ Reviews the literature about the assessment of creativity
Zhang, X., & Bartol, K. M. (2010). Linking empowering leadership and employee creativity: The influence of psychological empowerment, intrinsic motivation, and creative process engagement. Academy of management journal, 53(1), 107-128.
→ Focus on the link between leadership and employee creativity
Byron, K., & Khazanchi, S. (2012). Rewards and creative performance: a meta-analytic test of theoretically derived hypotheses. Psychological bulletin, 138(4), 809.
→ Focus on the impact of rewarding on creativity
Cohn, S. (2013). A firm-level innovation management framework and assessment tool for increasing competitiveness
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The article introduces a comprehensive corporate innovation management framework (v-CIM for Value-Added Corporate Innovation Management) and a targeted competitiveness assessment tool (i- TCA for Intelligent Targeted Competitiveness Assessment). The objective is to enable managers to decide on priorities for competitive development, adopt appropriate innovation strategies to meet corporate goals and help create and maintain a culture of innovation aligned with business goals.
Value-Added Corporate Innovation Management Framework: v-CIM
The Value-Added Corporate Innovation Management (v-CIM) framework has been developed to address the need of looking comprehensively at the multidimensional reality of the various domains of innovation within the firm in order to allow the firm’s leadership to manage innovation strategically in a balanced approach across all the critical domains of competitiveness.
The framework is represented as a pyramid composed of five layers, or domains. In all cases, the v-CIM framework enables the targeted selection of a balanced portfolio of indicators and associated metrics for effective measurement-based management of innovation in the company.
Intelligent Targeted Competitiveness Assessment: i-TCA
The objective for the author’s development of this tool was to create a framework and the means for undertaking consistent and comparative analysis of a company’s status and its evolutionary progress relative to primary competitors in its targeted markets.
The basic i-TCA tool consists of five sections, defined as sets of survey questions about the company background, the market background, the competitive attributes, the collaboration and the competitive assessment. The most useful part in terms of competitiveness assessment is the last one.
And at the end, the i-TCA tool provides an at-a-glance competitiveness-assessment dashboard that is built as a radial map, which allows direct visual analytics. Each radius on the circular map represents an area of competitive assessment, with zero competitive performance at the centre and 100% competitive leadership on the outside circle.
The areas of competitive assessment are grouped into five categories, which, in the basic i-TCA version contain the following parameters: Business position, market knowledge, corporate culture, technology & production and products & services.
The managerial implications could be summarized in three points:
First, companies should select a model to manage their innovation activities based on their sector.
Secondly, using the i-TCA tool, a company might discover that its competitive assessment doesn’t align with its strategic objectives and should either improve the lacking aspects or reconsider its strategy to a more adapted profile.
Finally, based on the previous implication, we figured it that would be important to give some tools and examples on how to define your innovation strategy, as some companies might work in the wrong direction.
However, some limitations could be found such as the fact that these frameworks are very subjective, relies on how CEO perceives the firm and the main competitors. Moreover, for the big multinational companies, there are several geographical differences and CEO and executive team may have imperfect knowledge from above, the knowledge being a critical attribute for innovation.
Appendix: Further references
Joly, P. (2017). Beyond the Competitiveness Framework? Models of Innovation Revisited. Journal of Innovation Economics & Management.22(1). 79-96.
Lawson, B. & Samson, D. (2001). Developing innovation capability in organisations: a dynamic capabilities approach. International Journal of Innovation Management. 5(3). 377-400.
Crossan, M. (2010). A Multi‐ Dimensional Framework of Organizational Innovation: A Systematic Review of the Literature. Journal of Management Studies. 47(6). 1154-
1191.
Amabile, T. M. (1997). Motivating creativity in organizations: On doing what you love and loving what you do. California Management Review, 40(1), 39-58.
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First, to put things in context, the traditional approach of creativity is that “creativity is something done by creative people”. It is a person-centered approach that does not take into account the role of social environment in creativity and innovation. In contrast to that, the componential theory of individual creativity is affirming that: “all humans with normal capabilities are able to produce at least moderately creative work in some domain, some of the time and that the social environment can also influence creative behavior”. That theory has 3 major components: the expertise, creative thinking and intrinsic task motivation. Expertise is the foundation for all creative work. It includes memory for factual knowledge, technical proficiency and special talents in the target work domain. Creative thinking provides that “something extra” in creative performance: it includes a cognitive style favorable to taking new perspectives on problems and depends to some extent on personality characteristics. However, it can be improved by learning to enhance cognitive flexibility and intellectual independence. Finally, intrinsic task motivation is driven by deep interest and involvement in the work, by enjoyment or curiosity. It will be more conducive to creativity than extrinsic motivation and to some extent, it can even compensate a lack of expertise or creative thinking. These three components are impacted by the work environment in which individuals operate.Therefore, this last impacts the creativity of individuals. More than that, according to the study, four dimensions of the work environment have an important impact on creativity: positive challenge in the work, organizational encouragement, work group supports and supervisory encouragement. Other dimensions such as resources, workload pressure and freedom are obviously impacting creativity, but to a lesser extent.
The first implication we highlighted is that, when hiring or allocating tasks to employees, a manager willing to create a creative team needs to look after people that are intrinsically motivated by the job. The reason behind it is that these people will be way less sensitive to things that might negatively impact their motivation than people who mainly work for an extrinsic reason, and will therefore be more likely to have a higher and steadier level of motivation. The second implication is that managers need to create and maintain a work environment that preserves or even enhances the intrinsic motivation of their employees over time. In other worlds, it is not enough to find people that have a natural passion in what they are doing as even if that kind of motivation is very strong, it can still vary over time and deeply suffer from different factors. Managers need to keep an eye on the evolution of the different factors affecting the work environment in order to preserve the intrinsic motivation of their employees and therefore foster their creativity.
One limit that we can identify from this study is that they have analyzed a company evolving in a fast moving environment to draw the conclusions presented above. Hence, we could ask ourselves to which extend we can apply the findings of the study to other industries maybe less impacted by a fast pace of change. Next to that, the article does not address at all the impact of the organization structure on the latter. While it seems that organizations with a more hierarchical structure – meaning organizational structures where processes are more centralized and formalized process – can have a negative impact on creativity, in opposition to a lean structure for example. Finally, to go a bit further, when reading the article, it feels like the concepts discussed in the paper mainly apply to higher level of responsibility in organization.
Show lessA second limitation that we highlighted from this article is that fact that it only addresses a theoretical point of view. Although it represent a strong basis for other research, the author could have gone a bit further in the topic. Giving concrete tips and techniques fostering creativity would have been useful for the reader.