Qualities of Innovative Leadership
What are the qualities of good leadership, or better yet innovative leadership? According to Margaret Wheatley, author of many books on innovative leadership including, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, perseverance in the face of challenge is one quality that stands out. 
Another is the ability to motivate those around you and energize their work, maintain a disciplined approach and value your team. What stands out most, however, as one of the most critical components of good leadership when looking at innovation within your organization is the ability to avoid the marginalization of innovators. Part of a leader’s job is to create a firewall so that staff can operate free from the bureaucratic, change-resistant forces of the larger organization. Keeping innovators inspired and motivated is no small task for a leader when typically innovators are operating in ways that are counter to the larger organization.
In a recent interview with Strategy and Business magazine’s Art Kleiner, Meg Wheatley describes what can happen when leaders misunderstand the initiatives and motivations of their own people, innovators who are successful but operating in a way that is largely counter to way things are always done. It is natural for fear-based leaders to ignore and even marginalize these team members because they don’t desire to learn new ways of doing things and fear the impact of these new ways.
Fear-based leadership practices come in many forms but what they all have in common is an operational mentality of maintaining status quo. This creates toxicity within the organization for innovators who are all about pushing the bounds of status quo, bringing in new ideas and garnering change. One way to overcome fear-based practices is for leaders to acknowledge they don’t have all of the answers. Another way is to avoid feeling ill-equipped for change because this resistance to change is futile. Change is. Maintaining status quo is no longer relevant in the complex world we operate in today.
But, what is so unique about effective, innovative leaders?
Innovative leaders have elements of a spiritual life or a personal spiritual discipline. They take the time to cultivate quiet in their lives to reflect upon the people and the processes within the larger context, bringing an enlightened understanding to their work.
I have worked for a lot of different leaders in a variety of settings; education, consulting, large organizations, small non-profits, and those leaders that I felt the greatest respect and the most gratitude towards were those that had an element of contemplation. I could find a resonant frequency within them that depicted some element of personal strength and awareness that came from something greater than themselves. What they possessed was a vision for our organization, and created a belief among our teams that we could bring into reality ‘greatness’ within our organization. They embraced change and guided the organization through times of change with great thought. They valued innovators and saw their potential to enhance the way forward. They were a pillar of strength for innovators to flourish and built the necessary constructs for innovators to thrive. These leaders were authentic and inspiring to work for.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Ray Anderson and Climate Neutral Carpet
Climate Neutral Carpet, by Ray Anderson
Ray C. Anderson (July 28, 1934 – August 8, 2011)was founder and chairman of Interface Inc., one of the world’s largest manufacturers of modular carpet for commercial and residential applications and a leading producer of commercial broadloom and commercial fabrics. (source: wikipedia)
Mr. Anderson understood the issue with sustainability and the role business and industry plays. He reframed the problem of consumption and affluence to a problem of happiness. Perhaps there is a way to be happy to take from the earth only what can be renewed by the earth? He conceded that Interface was as a plunderer of the earth. But, did not leave it there. He conceded that by digging up the earth and converting natural resources to products for a profit, he himself was a plunderer. However, he discovered that through transformative technologies and unique supplier relationships his company’s product could be created from materials of the earth in a sustainable way. He called it ‘cool’ carpet. According to Environmental Leader article dated August, 2011, “Interface says that in the past 17 years, it has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 24 percent, fossil fuel consumption by 60 percent, waste to landfill by 82 percent and water use by 82 percent, while avoiding over $450 million in costs, increasing sales by 63 percent and more than doubling earnings.” That is some kind of cool.
How did they do it? They started by using less oil, using less energy overall and less material. They made products last longer and recycled old carpet into new. They worked deals with nylon suppliers to get pre- and post-consumer recycled content materials– including a 100% recycled content fiber by sending fiber from reclaimed carpet.
We could all stand to learn from Ray Anderson, an inspirational entrepreneur and environmental visionary and businessman. Cool indeed.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Kinds of Innovation
Danny Hillis from Applied Minds speaks about the kinds of innovation: 1) Research, 2) Systems, and 3) Society.
Innovation occurs in research where new things are developed out of which systems can be built. For example, in government research labs (e.g. DoD) where deep knowledge of specific areas is known and cultivated. What may be lacking is knowledge of systems application or meeting the needs of customers (in the case of a government DoD lab, the warfighter). The second tier of innovation which he addresses is systems innovation. Putting building blocks together into a system and/or product technology. It is interesting to note what is key in accomplishing this: knowledge of people. I think this is where collaborative innovation or open innovation structures play a significant role. He brings up the apple story of the i-gadgets and the company’s ability to connect with many technology pieces and parts to build a system. This required not only an understanding of how people behave and the problems of the customer but how to connect with building block providers, suppliers in a way that revolutionized a market. The third level is society. He notes, “we change technology, but then technology changes us.” This kind of innovation is happening everywhere, but he comments that this happens more often outside of the US.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Crowd Accelerated Innovation
Crowd Accelerated Innovation by Chris Anderson
Crowd sourcing says, let’s outsource our tasks, our needs from an employee or a contractor to a large group of people as an open call or challenge or need. (see wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing)
But Chris Anderson is saying something different! And, he is calling it Crowd Accelerated Innovation. Watch and listen for new ways of thinking about your stuff, your ideas, your teams ideas, and how you view your community and your life. It is great!
In a recent TED talk, (http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/955) Chris Anderson (who started TED) suggests a different way of interacting with people, different from what I understand crowd-sourcing to be about—and this intrigued me. This is about sharing creative ideas, connecting with these ideas and how these ideas stimulate your thoughts and ideas, your groups and teams thoughts and ideas. And, how new ideas propel your learning, your team’s learning, and accelerate ideas to innovations.
In Innovation in R&D, video is changing the game.
Examples include Jove (http://www.jove.com/); a peer reviewed, PubMed indexed journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format or UrWeb.Tv (http://urweb.tv/index.html) where Cyberpitches are video produced to demonstrate a technology and its capability in order to accelerate technology transfer efforts from government, university, emerging companies and research labs to commercial markets.
The ‘primal medium’ Chris refers to is simple, VIDEO connected through the internet, but it is profoundly demonstrated in its impact on accelerating innovation and transferring knowledge, information, ideas to people from people.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Education and the Future of Innovation
Creativity is as important as literacy in education, according to Sir Ken Robinson.
Creativity is developing, generating something new of value and insight. I love this because Sir Ken states it spot-on in saying if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything new. And what an elegant way to state what is fundamental to innovation. In order to innovate you have to be prepared to be wrong, to fail. And, leadership has to be prepared to support failures. Those is innovation often say, fail fast and often.
I think we have to recognize that we have to be prepared to be wrong in order to innovate. What is sad is that as we grow and evolve we are trained to avoid failure, to be wrong as little as possible. What this teaches us is to learn what the box is and how to climb in. Don’t explore, stay within the lines. To create is to open oneself to scrutiny and judgement. But, what you see in stories of innovation is creativity and a preparedness for failure. Think of Edison, Einstein, the Wright brothers, and many others. What I additionally love about what Sir Ken Robinson purports is that we are all intelligent and there are many levels and facets of intelligence. The only hope for the future is understanding the richness of capacity within ourselves and within all people.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Innovation in R&D
Wouldn’t it be nice to read about applied innovation at the R&D level, rather than one more story about the ‘disruptive’ razor blade solution or the ‘breakthrough’ car foam turned household cleaner?
What opportunities are out there for innovation practitioners to develop and collaborate with communities of practice on applied innovation processes in R&D? In my current knowledge, I know of none.
Much of what is out there in the public domain in written form (blogs, articles, tweets, etc.) is largely ‘case study’ oriented, written from a distance by educated journalists, reporters, business or innovation analysts….but not much out there from the people who actually DO innovation within their organizations. And by that I mean literally, the doers…not the upper management with visions of grandeur.
I think it would be great to have this practice-level work exposed beyond stories about solution seekers finding unlikely found solution solvers for big companies to pump into a product portfolio for billion dollar gains. Now, I realize that this proposition can bring all kinds of anxiety up. Innovation practices are proprietary and clearly confidential, for good competitive reasons within companies. And, the consulting firms that provide these services to corporations also hold close their methods and approaches. But, wouldn’t it be nice to read more about applied innovation at the R&D level, rather than one more story about the ‘disruptive’ razor blade solution or the ‘breakthrough’ car foam turned household cleaner?
Just asking.
Seeking opportunities for non-academic, rather hands-on learnings, that can be shared collaboratively with peers developing and conducting innovation and open innovation processes and practices within their organizations for advancing R&D in meaningful and value-add ways that supports long term, complex research efforts.
See discussion in the IDEA Lab group on linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=3048930&trk=anet_ug_hm&goback=.anh_3048930
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Knowing what you don’t know….
Currently sitting at National Innovation Conference in Dayton Ohio at the Hope Hotel.
Getting energized by the creative energy, the openness to learning, and the courage of people.
What sticks out in my mind is a question for the ‘problem space’ of innovation: If you don’t go where you don’t want to go, how will you know what you don’t know?
This was something I used with my students years ago (back in the day as a high school science teacher in the southwest of Ohio) who were resistant to learning something new that by appearance seemed to have nothing to do with their life, and nothing to do with their future.
What happened through consistent presence was ‘trust’ that if we collectively go together, something awesome could happen to them:
For example: Ms. Riley what does an atom have to do with me?
we found that the way an atom lives and how it lives in balance and dances with other atoms to make molecules was instructive to us in our lives and our life’s challenges. Not to mention that the obvious was learned—I am atoms that are compressible to the head of a pin, and together in unison with energy makes me a human ‘being.’ Talk about a gee-whiz moment!
Where is it that you feel resistance within? What or who do you feel resistant to? What is it that you don’t want to learn?
Steve Goubeaux from Goodwill and Easter Seals asked us this morning: Do you know how to think BIG, and try small? Do you try stupid things and turn something into stupendous? Can you accept being challenged?
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
National Innovation TRIZCON 2010 Oct. 7-8th coming up soon!
I am working with colleagues from Cincinnati Ohio to co-host and co-sponsor the National Innovation TRIZCON 2010 event this October in Dayton, OH. The event traditionally is held to expose and train people interested in Altshuller’s theory of inventive problem solving (acronym: TRIZ or TIPS). This year is different. The event will couple an additional track on innovation with speakers who will be covering topics such as front-end problem deconstruction, innovation end-to-end approaches, methods, tools, innovation culture and leadership, etc. I am very excited to be working to bring methods of practice into the fold of the innovation discussion. I think this event will be a great chance for small-medium sized business leaders of Dayton and Cincinnati to immerse themselves into the best-in-class thinkers on innovation, build networks, and learn practical approaches for implementation.
The event will be held on Oct. 7-8th at the Hope Hotel near Wright Patterson Air Force Base and Wright State University. Stay tuned for details real soon on getting registered, the agenda filled with top creative problem solvers, innovation strategists, practitioners, and thought leaders from NASA, AFRL, P&G, and many more.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Landscaping global talent and state-of-the-art just got easier: Elsevier acquires Collexis
See article here for news story: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_01551
Elsevier contains many, many journals containing millions of publications with loads of connections to university scholars, researchers, and institutes. They are appealing to me for many reason including the fact that they house robust tools to enable your R&D work including: CAPCAS, ChemVillage, CrossFire Beilstein, CrossFire Gmelin, EngineeringVillage 2, illumin8, PharmaPendium, Scopus
Conducting secondary research isn’t an easy task. Working across various data sources to locate the expertise and landscape technical spaces for problem deconstruction is tedious and not just an act of science, but is an art. I think the science part may be a little lighter with this new development. We’ll see. Elsevier product expansion is something to watch.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
Innovation in US Department of Education
The US Department of Education has released just recently (~late March) the first ever Open Innovation Portal for the agency to leverage the ingenuity of our people in order to drive new ideas, create collaborative groups, and generate innovations for education in our schools, for our teachers, for our education leaders, for our children, and for improved learning. This portal “provides a public forum for all who wish to participate in creating opportunities for partnership and local private and public funding – potentially multiplying many times over the federal funding opportunity,” James H. Shelton III, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement said upon release of the site.
https://innovation.ed.gov/index/
It looks to me like a great idea that I am hopeful will produce some results. But as Sir Ken Robinson stated in a recent TED presentation, “we need a revolution, not an evolution” in education. Having taught high school chemistry and physics for 11 years in the public education system and worked on many reform efforts including a few funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I would have to agree with Sir Ken Robinson. Reform approaches mean that we are only looking to evolve what is, in incremental isolated ways. We need a revolution of what is.
On a funding note, President Obama put forth $650 Million or so as part of the $5 billion investment in school reform in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). This money, some $100M will be allocated in FY10 from a grant effort called Investing in Innovation Fund (i3). In February 2009, President Obama stood before a joint session of Congress and announced that by 2020 the United States would once again have the highest percentage of college-educated adults in the world.” More information on the i3 can be found at: http://ed.gov/programs/innovation/factsheet.html
I think of the testing mandates of No Child Left Behind, and I think of the multitudes of 12th grade, senior students that I tutored in the late hour afternoons of April and May going over and over again with them Newton’s Laws, the organelles of the animal cell, and the fundamentals of the atom. Their graduation diploma hung in the balance of the Science Ohio Graduation Test, the famous OGT. Where were they? Were we NOT leaving them behind by ensuring that they could answer the correct multiple choice questions about forces, mitochondria, and protons? A singular score of a 401 would release them, a 399 or less would humiliate them.
I am hopeful, I am hopeful indeed that we will begin to revolutionize the US Education system to truly and earnestly leave no child behind.
Emily Riley: Innovation Practitioner
