Can an innovation culture be fixed on demand?

Can the innovation culture be fixed on demand? That’s the question we answer in this episode.

But first, what, exactly, is an innovation culture? A culture of innovation can be thought of as a special, collective mindset that values and promotes curiosity, the exploration of new ideas, and change. It encourages the adoption of new ideas, and treats both as key success factors for the organization, holistically.

The culture of innovation is a system of values and principles that breaks the organizational silos and hierarchical barriers, by inspiring and empowering people and teams to collaborate effectively toward a big organizational purpose.

So, can such a culture be fixed on demand? No. You cannot buy it, mandate it, or run a programme for it. It can only evolve, or, as the book puts it: “The innovation culture cannot be fixed on demand.”

Here is the belief we hear most often. A culture programme will fix it. A launch, a workshop series, a set of posters, a new set of values on the wall. We have watched leadership teams run expensive programmes to change the collective mindset and set the focus on innovation. They typically fail for one reason: failure to recognize that culture only evolves organically. Whatever improvements you get out of such initiatives are only ephemeral. When the programme ends, the old habits return.

An innovation culture rests on six key principles. Trust. Safety. Openness. Curiosity. Purposefulness. And healthy competition.

Where these hold, people share their ideas and build on the ideas of others. Leaders are closer, and failure is accepted, as part of the process. And a feeling appears that we would call the real test: one team, working toward one purpose.

If you cannot install a culture, what can you do? You can trigger its evolution. Four moves. First, understand the current state. Ask your people where innovation gets stuck. The answers we see most: a weak link to purpose, bureaucracy, fear of failure, and leaders who are too far away. Second, measure continuously. An always-on pulse check tells you whether anything you changed is working. Third, open new channels. For example, a skip-level programme lets a person with an idea reach the decision maker who can act on it. Fourth, empower an informal community of innovators. A self-organizing group that produces results and leads by example.

And, most importantly, reward the behaviours, not only the winning ideas.

Why does all this matter even more in the era of AI? Ideas used to be scarce and expensive. Today, a team with AI can generate a hundred ideas in an afternoon. So the scarce thing is no longer the idea. It is the culture that decides which ideas get tried, by whom, and how fast a failure is forgiven. In other words, AI makes culture more decisive, not less.

And when does a true culture of innovation begin? The book’s answer: “The true culture of innovation starts evolving when a critical mass of people engages with the innovation function as a means of pursuing the purpose of the organization.”

Now we’d love to hear yours! What’s your biggest question about innovation? Ask it in the comments, and we’ll answer the best ones. Stay in Innovation Mode.