There is saying, kind of a crude little formula, I have been using for years when I write and give talks on what it takes to build a culture where people innovate routinely (which I think I stole from Charles O'Reilly at the Stanford Business School):
Creativity + implementation = innovation
I have always found it a useful oversimplification of the two big things that have to happen in order to innovate, to cash in on new ideas. It is also related to one of the main ideas in Weird Ideas That Work, that creativity is about increasing the amount of variation and all around messiness and routine work is about driving out variance and driving in order and predictability.
In this spirit, one of
the student groups in my class on Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based
Approach, did a fantastic case study of the culture of innovation at Lunar Design. The members were Ioannis Alivizatos, Meeta Arora, Stephen Streeter, and Ben
Merrick. They heard the quote in the
title of this post from John Edson (pictured to the left), Lunar product design firm that has designed many
familiar products including the HP Touchsmart, the Oral B CrossAction
toothbrush, and the Modu phone. I think that "“From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit” conveys a similar message to the one I borrowed from Charles – that the
messiness and failure required to generate a new idea needs to be shut-off as
you move into the implementation phase, where more control and order are
required. Knowing how and when to make
that shift is tough, although the best firms and bosses make it happen
routinely. For example, Intel’s motto “disagree
and then commit” reflects this spirit – you fight during the creative part, but
join arms to make the idea work during the implementation part, even if you
think the decision was wrong.
P.S. And following my last post on failure, I also liked how a key element of their culture was that, when people made mistakes, they framed it as "Paying for education."
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