Build a Genuinely Collaborative World-Class Organization

(25503)

Most of what is usually written about innovation is based on the myth of the lone genius working in splendid isolation. With this in mind, the real key to making any organization more innovative is to make it easier for effective group collaboration to occur.

The more teams you can get interacting together, the more robust and worthwhile will be the innovations which flow. Design your organization to maximize group interactions and you create the ideal conditions for breakthrough new ideas to bubble up and get noticed.

This same principle of working together can also be scaled up to society as a whole. If new and better ways of working together can emerge, we can literally solve every problem we face.

In an effort to foster group genius style innovation, many corporations are now creating and maintaining innovation labs–group made up of people from different corporate functions who have know-how and skills in all phases of the product development cycles. Some examples:

Motorola’s best-selling Razr phone was created by a team based in downtown Chicago.

Procter & Gamble has its Clay Street Project in Cincinnati, where teams have created new brands in ten weeks.

Sony creates collaborations among designers, engineers and marketers to develop new product lines.

Mattel’s Project Platpus takes teams of between twelve and twenty employees and puts them into a temporary workspace for three months where they are expected to conceive and develop a new brand, complete with product, business plan and packaging.

Fisher-Price has The Cave, where cross-functional teams develop new product ideas.

Notably, these innovation labs are differet from the more traditional skunkworks approach to innovation. In a skunkworks, a small group of selected people are isolated and expected to come up with a big flash of insight. Innovation labs take rank-and-file employees on temporary assignment and allow them to come up with small insights, each one hopefully sparking another, in the quest for something big. Since the people in the innovation labs are going back to their normal job assignments very shortly, they can take these new insights with them and keep on collaborating in the future. Innovation labs typically infuse the entire organization with innovative thinking rather than concentrating these activities in one place.

10 secrets

Innovation labs are a good start, but the real payoff comes when you manage to scale up and then distribute the creative power of collaboration the entire length and breadth of your organization. Highly innovative companies do ten things that help foster collaboration:

Keep many irons in the fire: in the same way venture capital companies make a large number of investments. Some break even, others fail without a trace and then some are blockbuster success stories. You can’t tell how the future will ultimately unfold, so if you can keep multiple projects on the back burner and active at all times, you’ll be well placed no matter what happens. With a bit of luck, one of these projects just might end up becoming the next big thing.

Create a “department of surprises”: a group of people who are devoted to finding unanticipated applications for the technologies currently under development. A number of successful products actually came about as by-products of other development programs. If you don’t have someone watching out for this, it’s easy for promising technologies to get lost in the shuffle. Accordingly, collaborative organizations are always looking for radical innovations that can and should be commercialized. At the very least, this department should boost the morale of the people who work on projects that don’t quite pan out as planned.

Build physical spaces where creative conversations can occur: open floors where people can walk by, see what is being worked on and add their feedback. Many high tech companies are designing their workspaces in such a way that these spontaneous conversations are encouraged to happen because they provide a rich vein of new ideas. This also has the effect of strengthening the informal information-sharing network within the organization, which is not a bad thing either.

Allow time for new ideas to emerge: which essentially means don’t forever make people work to tight deadlines. Asmittedly, some people work better under pressure, but this is not usually the case for highly creative jobs. In most cases, the less hectic the workday is, the more creative thinking gets done. Working in a low-pressure environment allows collaborative conversations to occur, sparks of insight to get noticed and ideas to incubate and form properly. Perhaps a good example of this was AT&T’s Bell Labs, the inventor of the transistor and the laser, which had an official corporate philosophy: “Big ideas take time.”

Manage the risks of improvisation: which usually fall into three categories:

1. When people are spending time innovating, they are using time and resources that could be devoted to other production activities.
2. Improvisation can take the organization into new areas unrelated to its current long-term vision and strategy.
3. Too many new ideas might bubble up, and the organization may spread its resources too thin and lose focus on its core business.

To be successful, collaborative organizations need to deftly and intelligently manage those risks. How this is actually achieved will vary from one organization to the next, but the general principle is that there must be effective management of all the risks if collaboration is to flourish.

Learn how to improvise at the “edge of chaos”: meaning provide enough structure so that total chaos doesn’t result, but not so much formal structure that new ideas get stifled. Some companies find the best way to do this is to have well-defined managerial roles and highly explicit project priorities. Others encourage team members from different projects to socialize together and kick around ideas. What’s needed is a general consensus and plan on how to proceed with sufficient flexibility so changes can be made to respond to unexpected developments.

Manage knowledge for innovation: have procedures in place that recognize good improvisations and then spread them throughout the organization as a whole. This may be as simple as having headquarters explain new solutions to all the operating branches of the organization. Or alternatively, this may happen more if jobs within the organization are defined as broadly as possible so people are encouraged to develop a wider set of skills and connections, Frequent job reassignments may also allow know-how to spread more effectively.

Build your internal networks: so you can use sophisticated information systems that encourage collaboration. With e-mail so pervasive nowadays, it’s obvious that this can be a great tool for helping people connect and continue their conversations. Work with this by developing an electronic directory that details what skills your people have. If your culture says anyone with a good idea should feel free to speak with anybody else who can help them take idea further, then it’s more likely that collaboration will occur. Share information and decentralize decision making as far as possible using every tool available.

Make your organizational chart obsolete: and encourage everyone to collaborate with whomever they feel most comfortable working with. Don’t insist that people stay exclusively within their own units, because this will stifle collaboration. Be flexible and allow some strange combinations to occur, because these are often a petridish for the breeding of innovative new ideas.

Measure the right things: how much collaboration is occurring organization-wide rather than how much money is spent on R&D or how many patents are being won. If you really want to know whether collaboration is happening in your organization:

1. Count the proportion of time people are spending on small exploratory projects. More is better up to around 20 percent of total staff time.
2. Measure the average length of your development projects before they are either scaled up or terminated. Shorter is better in this area.
3. Examine how effectively your organization celebrates and rewards failure. If people feel penalized for trying something new, they won’t bother.

In all, a corporate mantra for the collaborative era might be: “Fail often, fail early, fail gloriously.” Remember, your goal is not to have a separate R&D division charged with responsibility to do everyone’s creative thinking. Instead, you want to harness the mind power of everyone: engineering, marketing, sales, service, manufacturing and more. Collaboration needs to happen the length and breadth of your organization.

5 key features

Collaboration shouldn’t stop at the company’s walls. Instead, a collaborative web should be built that brings customers, suppliers and other key business partners into the loop.

Collaborative Web includes: Your Company, Customers, Suppliers, Business Partners, Others

These webs can be extremely powerful at generating innovation because of their five key features:

New innovations can be built incrementally on a long track record of prior innovations: which allows a number of small sparks to build momentum. No truly creative products launch fully grown, but are almost always improvements and enhancements on what went before. Cillaborative webe are very good at allowing that to happen.

Successful innovations are always a combination of many good ideas: with aspects emerging at different times and put forward by different people. Synergy often results when many ideas come together.

In collaborative webs, there is frequent interaction among the various parties: which is good because it casts the net wider. Companies do something comparable by rotating staff between projects every few years to encourage cross pollination of ideas. With collaborative webs, diversity of opinion and backgrounds are automatically built in.

Collaborative webs allow multiple discoveries to happen: in fact, if different teams are utilizing different approaches, that is highly desirable. It means that what eventually emerges will be robust and practical rather than theoretical or highly dependant on specific variables. Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab once famously remarked: “Innovation is inefficient.” Collaborative webe allow multiple efforts and frequent failure to happen, which is good from the perspective of coming up with breakthrough ideas.

No single company owns the web: and therefore everyone can share in the value of the ideas being generated. The fact that everyone owns the ideas and can get in on the action is good, because it encourages more parties to get involved. The strongest webs will be made up of companies that value their independence and autonomy.

Generally speaking, most new innovations don’t stand alone. They usually become commercially successful only if a collaborative web of suppliers, partners and marketers also emerges around them. Thus it is smart business to build as strong a collaborative web as early as possible and to make multiple connections to that web.

Of all the parties in a collaborative web, probably the most important from a collaboration and innovation perspective are your customers. There are hundreds of examples of successful products that have emerged from customer feedback or from coustomers using products in ways that were never even envisaged by the original product developers.

To take just a few examples:

Kleenex were originally marketed by Kimberley-Clark as disposable cloths for the removal of makeup. It wasn’t until the company received mail noting that men were using the tissues to blow their noses that the thought emerged that this might be a viable use for the product. The company changed its marketing to selling Kleenex as a disposable handkerchief in the 1930s and has never looked back.

Google bases its page rankings on group genius. No one in the company decides which pages should rank higher than others. Page rankings are based on the collective wisdom of everyone who uses the Web, ensuring better and more reliable results.

In the 1970s, health and exercise a fad. People started to mix wheir wine soda water to lower the drink’s calorie count. Soft-drink makers took note of this and started introducing ready-to-drink wine coolers.

Also in the 1970s, sailboarders found they were falling off their boards then they sailed over the tops of waves at high speed. Their response was to equip their boards with foot straps, something that had not even occurred to the board manufacturers of that era. Today, it’s almost impossible to buy a sailboard that doesn’t also include manufacturer-designed foot straps.

Research in Motion, the company that makes the BlackBerry personal digital assistant, decided to share its proprietary software in 2002. Once Nokia, Siemens, Motorola and others licensed the software, the RIM system became the defacto market standard. Ultimately, sales of BlackBerrys increased from 50 to 100 percent each subsequent year because everyone was confident all of their customers would be able to connect to it as well.

Many of the current generation of video games allow players to modify the rules to suit their own tastes. This is called “modding,” and some modder do such a good job that the company who developed the game in the first place hires them to help with future versions. Other companies have used these modifications as the basis for new versions of the game that often sell more than the original versions did in the first place.

The whole point is that customers have always driven collaboration, and many companies have taken abvantage of customer feedback to enhance their product offerings. Some very high-profile companies like Wilipedia and YouTube have even built their entire businesses around material contributed solely by their customers. The best way to encourage this kind of collaboration is to foster links between the organization and the collaborative web. If customers feel comfortable interacting with anyone in your organization and not just your sales or customer service people, great things can happen. With e-mail and Websites dedicated to customer feedback, this is actually easier than ever to make happen.

Application to society at large

The same benefits of collaboration could also be gained by society at large if changes were made in the legal system to actively encourage more collaboration. Specifically, seven aspects aspects of the legal system need to be modified:

Copyright terms need to be reduced: so more people can take the work of others as a natural starting point. Copyright owners have used their influence in recent times to extend copyright terms, whereas shorter terms will foster collaboration.

A fair way to reward small sparks needs to become available: because patents are a case of overkill for very small sparks of innovation.

Making modifications to existing products should be legally allowed and encouraged: because this is how innovations bubble to the surface. If it is illegal to modify an existing product, many people will be reluctant to do so.

Encourage the free flow of employees: by making noncompete contacts unenforceable. If individuals can move from company to company at will, a much more vibrant and open marketplace for ideas will emerge.

Make licensing of patents and copyrights mandatory: at a fixed default rate if no other commercial arrangements are negotiated. This will allow for information to circulate more readily, which is what you want.

Pool patents: so every company can share in the collective benefits of commercializing new technologies rather than wasting resources in pointless legal wars.

Encourage the establishment of industry-wide standards: because this has had the effect of enhancing innovation whenever it has happened in the past. Make it easy for people to add new innovations.

Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company.Just the opposite: Innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies. When I ask creators where their ideas come from, they always tell stories about collaboration and connection, about innovations that emerge from a creative space that spreads out across the entire company–and sometimes beyond its boundaries.

–Keith Sawyer

The myth of the lone genius has amazing power and persistence. This myth isn’t only wrong: it’s also dangerous because it ultimately has the effect of reducing creativity. If you believe that creativity is reserved for special geniuses, you’re more likely to think that you can’t be creative. If you believe that creativity is an unexplainable gift that happens in a magical flash of insight, you won’t invest the hard and sustained work that it takes to generate a long string of small sparks. This is why understanding the science of group genius is so important. To build the kinds of organizations that generate innovation, we have to move beyond these myths and tap into the creative power of collaboraation. To attain our creative potential as a society, we need to embrace the real truth about creativity

–Keith Sawyer