Innovation Newsletter
Helping you improve innovation
November 2008
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What does the credit crunch mean for you and your business? Many people are cutting expenditures. Many organisations are focusing on conserving cash, improving efficiency and reducing costs. This may be enough for survival but it is not a formula for success. The businesses that benefit from the recession will be those that find new and better ways to meet customer needs. A recession produces opportunities as well as threats. The agile organisation that can add value in new ways will emerge stronger. Cost cutting is important but not sufficient. The need for innovation allied with sensible risk management has never been higher.

Within larger organizations one of the biggest obstacles to innovation is poor internal communication. A silo mentality develops so that departments guard information and ideas rather than share them. People work hard - but in isolated groups. Internal politics can compound the problem with rivalry and turf wars obstructing collaboration. It can reach the ridiculous stage where the enemy is seen as another department inside rather than the competitors outside. The leader has to tear down the internal fences, punish internal politics and reward cooperation. This sometimes calls for drastic or innovative actions.

Nokia has an informal rule that no one should eat lunch at their desk or go out for lunch. People are encouraged to eat in the subsidized cafeterias and to mix with people from outside their department. They have found that the informal meetings across departments are beneficial in sharing ideas and understanding.

Every organization has to find ways to promote internal communication and collaboration and to fight internal division and competition. There are some specific ideas for breaking down barriers to communication in the full article.
Here is my letter with some heartfelt advice from a father to his teenage daughter . It was posted on Life Hack and has had a very positive response.
I have just come across some interesting research on brainstorming methods on the MIT Sloan (no relation!) Management Review. Two types of groups generated ideas. One followed a traditional model, assembling a group - in this case, students studying product design - and having them come up with appropriate product ideas for dorm rooms. They worked solely in a group. The other group took a hybrid approach: Those students worked on ideas by themselves before coming together to share their thinking. Which technique yielded the best ideas? Strictly speaking, the traditional brainstorming groups came up with the very best ideas. They also came up with the very worst ones. In other words, their results' quality varied much more than did the hybrid group's results. The hybrid group produced more ideas that were, on average, of higher quality. "When it comes to innovation, the extremes are what matter - not the norm and not the average." So, if both groups work for the same amount of time, the traditional brainstorming team "significantly outperforms" the hybrid group when it comes to producing the best ideas, according to the authors.

This finding contradicts most existing literature on the subject, which tends to conclude that while working in teams is more satisfying, working alone generates the most effective ideas.
According to an article on Entrepreneur.com, Einstein shared ten key traits with entrepreneurs. Innovative thinkers display the same characteristics. The article reinforces the message with examples from Google, Nike, Virgin and Coca-Cola. The traits are:
  1. Imagination
  2. Questioning
  3. New Ways of Thinking
  4. Intuition
  5. Positive Attitude
  6. Taking Naps!
  7. Rising above Mundane Detail
  8. Willingness to try new things - and fail!
  9. Maintaining Balance
  10. Mastering Technology
For all you hopeless romantics here is a lovely little video clip showing innovation in popping the question.
If you have been wondering how we can get such wild turbulence on the financial markets, here is a picture that explains it all.

Paul Sloane
Destination Innovation

phone: +44.1276.670236
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