How Organisations Can Cultivate
Innovation Catalysts
The most innovative leaders possess
special skills that cannot be entirely taught. But they can be learnt.
Given the highly complex, uncertain and
dynamic environments facing all firms nowadays, it is more important than ever
to prepare your organisation to tackle any business challenge with an
innovative mindset. That is the only way to transform existing and emerging
threats into opportunities for future success. Accomplishing this requires a
special type of leader – a type I call the innovation catalyst.
Years of research and various collaborations
with some of the world’s most innovative companies have given me ample
opportunity to study innovation catalysts at work. I’ve seen that what
distinguishes them is a set of three fundamental capabilities:
§
The ability to uncover user-centred insights
and transform them into innovation opportunities
§
The ability to transcend existing
problem-solving approaches and ideate novel, creative solutions to business
challenges
§
An aptitude for enabling agile
experimentation
To break it down further, innovation
catalysts are characterised by their insightfulness, creative thinking and
agility.
Every organisation needs innovation catalysts
at all levels of management – the larger the organisation, the more of them it
needs. As things stand, there are not enough of these precious individuals to
go around. That is the bad news. The good news, however, is that the three key
skills outlined above can certainly be learnt. Since 2017, I have helped
business leaders learn them in my yearly Innovation
by Design executive education programme. Yet
these skills cannot be taught – at least, not entirely. If you’re puzzled or
intrigued, keep on reading.
Innovation catalysts and design thinkers
In many respects, the unique skillset of
innovation catalysts resembles design thinking, which has become a central
concept of business learning. Like designers, innovation catalysts use
unconventional cognitive strategies and disruptive creative approaches to
untangle problems that are unsolvable by standard means.
However, there is more to becoming an
innovation catalyst than reading books on design thinking or taking a typical
course on the subject. This is true for two reasons. First, having a design
skillset alone is not enough to innovate in business settings. As is well
known, Steve Jobs did not design products himself; rather, he excelled at
conjuring the best resources to create meaningful and transformational
innovations. His ability to integrate the value of design into Apple made
him one of the greatest innovation catalysts the world has ever seen.
Second, I have found in my research that a
large part of design talent is nuanced and subtle – the outgrowth of instinct
and intuition as much as learnt technique. While technique and process can be
conveyed in a standard academic format such as a lecture or workshop, the
unconscious knowledge of professional designers does not translate well in
those contexts. Yet, such a design mindset can be quite useful to solve
business problems in innovative ways.
Hence, innovation catalysts are those
who understand the value of design and integrate it well in the organisation to
solve business problems. They also recognise that understanding the value of
design requires not only learning design techniques but, most importantly,
internalising the design mindset.
Creative stars
If you want to learn a new language, most
experts agree that full immersion is a superior method. Similarly, the best way
to internalise the design mindset is to work alongside designers to solve
concrete business problems.
My recently published research bears this
out. Studying U.S. design patents for the years 1975-2010, my co-authors and I
found that designers
who collaborated with “stars” (i.e. those
with the most-cited patents) in the field were more likely to become stars
themselves. This phenomenon had less to do with self-selection than with the
nature of the collaboration. We found that stars possess special creative
skills – such as the ability to combine unlikely elements into novel ideas
which they refine into great innovations – that rubbed off on those they worked
with.
Just as collaborating with stars enables
non-star talents to evolve, design novices such as business executives can
absorb key innovation competencies by working with gifted designers, both star
and non-star.
Management consultancies have caught on to
this notion as well. Witness the recent launch of the McKinsey
Design division, a product of the
consultancy’s prior acquisition of two design firms: Lunar in 2015, and Veryday
in 2016. As Benedict Sheppard, a partner at McKinsey Design in London, put it:
“If we can take the end pieces of strategy and operations, and now bring the
actual design capabilities, then we can do something quite extraordinary.”
Rival professional service firms Accenture and Boston Consulting Group have
also acquired design houses to enrich their advice with the same unique
innovation perspective.
Innovation by Design
INSEAD’s Innovation by Design (IBD) programme
was created with these trends very much in mind. A three-and-a-half-day highly
experiential learning experience held in Singapore, it has business
practitioners team up with designers from California’s renowned ArtCenter to solve realistic innovation
challenges.
The programme’s activities focus on
developing the three main attributes of innovation catalysts: insightfulness,
creativity and agility. Through business cases, participants explore how
innovation catalysts act in various organisational settings, including the
public sector as well as firms such as Apple and McKinsey. The programme
includes time for reflection so that participants can contemplate how best to
apply their new skills in their organisational roles.
Obviously,
innovation cannot be taught in a few days – or months, for that matter. What
organisations can do, however, is create an experiential working environment
involving close collaboration with designers. To ensure the organisation reaps
the benefit, managers should then be given free rein to exercise their budding
creative powers.
Manuel Sosa, INSEAD Associate Professor of Technology and Operations Management | January 15, 2019
Read more at
https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/how-organisations-can-cultivate-innovation-catalysts-10771#czGhLWkJtEoLsF9M.99
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