Leadership and Innovation

CHANCES ARE YOUR ORGANIZATION has some people who are passionate about innovation and others who feel uncomfortable about any topic related to change. Recent academic research finds that differences in individual creativity often matter far less for innovation than connections and networks.

Since new ideas seem to spur mom new ideas, networks generate a cycle of innovation. Furthermore. effective networks allow people of different ages, with different kinds of knowledge and ways of tackling problems to cross-fertilize ideas. By focusing on getting the most from innovation networks. organizations can capture more value from existing resources.

In one global nonprofit company, we found three groups with distinct perspectives on innovation, one believed that the company was innovative, but the other two, with 57 percent of its employees, thought that it wasn't. When we combined the analysis of personal perspectives on innovation with a network map. we found opportunities for improvement. Paradoxically, the analysis revealed that those employees, largely middle managers, with the most negative attitude toward innovation were also the most highly sought after for advice about it due to the hierarchical culture. In effect. they served as bottlenecks to the flow of new ideas and the open sharing of knowledge. A further analysis of the people in this group highlighted their inability to balance new ideas with current priorities and to behave as leaders rather than supervisors. We have observed that middle managers pose similar challenges in many organizations.

Shaping innovation networks is both an art and a science. Making networks more decentralized is another way to improve collaboration and performance (Exhibit 1). Consider the case of two geographically separate units that undertake the same activities. A larger leadership group with an open and positive mindset is a distinguishing feature of the higher-performing unit. Its information network is also more decentralized. with a larger number of connections. Hierarchy is still evident in the higher-performing unit. but its information and knowledge network is more distributed, and more of the members participate actively. The lower-performing unit has just one leader, who controls most of the interactions and has a negative mindset about openness and collaboration, and there are far fewer connections. The network design is more centralized.

The four critical steps in designing, implementing, and managing an innovation network are presented in Exhibit 2.

Innovation networks, like cross-functional teams, require different skills and attitudes. In our experience, they include combinations of several archetypes: idea generators prefer to come up with ideas, researchers mine data to find patterns, which they use as a source of new ideas, experts value proficiency in a single domain and relish opportunities to get things done, and produces orchestrate the activities of the network. Others come to them for new ideas or to get things done. Producers are also the most likely members of the network to be making connections across teams and groups. High-performing organizations not surprisingly have a higher percentage of producers.