Most often ideas need some attention and enrichments from others to grow to a more mature state before a good decision can be made whether an idea should be picked up to start a project. Hence the seed-metaphor; a seed also needs some attention and enrichment (water) to grow. The nice thing about the upcoming social software tools (Enterprise2.0 software) is that they suit this approach very well. First of all with tools like idea management software it is very easy for employees, and possibly suppliers and clients as well, to contribute ideas. But the real difference stems from the fact that you can use the collective brainpower to enrich (or grow) these ideas. A third interesting aspect of these type of tools is the fact that ideas (and their enrichments) get stored online. So far my story about software tools, because as the name implies they are merely the tools to become more innovative; It’s all about the way you use these tools whether your company will be successful at innovating.

To come back to the failure aspect, another quote in this context is very apt. It is a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, directed to his employees: “I hope you fail often and I hope you fail fast”. As I described before, Google is a very innovative company. What Schmidt implies with his statement is that he wants Google employees to try out a lot of new ideas. In his quote the company culture is pronounced that it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes or formulate an idea that won’t make it. It is part of the process to come to new successful products or services as long as you learn from the mistakes and failures. The more you fail, the more you learn; while the faster you fail, less costs are made to learn. This learning from failures and uncovering rapidly whether an idea is worth an investment in time and money to develop further is very well supported by social tools like idea management software. Like stated before, all the failures (ideas that won’t make it now) are stored online. So others that come up with the same idea at a later stage won’t have to spend time and money to do research for that idea. While over time, the market might have changed or new technologies might have come available and an idea that was rejected before might be great to develop now.

Probably the most crucial aspect in the above described situation is creating a company culture where failure is not punished but stimulated. A CEO stating that exact message is a very important drive for a company to become more innovative.

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During the third exercise you check the activities against 8 barriers that can hinder the community performing these activities. If the activities or the people involved in these activities are hindered by any of the barriers described below, it is best to find other activities that are less hindered. There are ways to deal with these barriers, but I will discuss these in a later post.

Freedom and time

In many cases engaging in online collaboration or knowledge sharing does not tie directly to peoples day to day work. This becomes more the case as the work people do is more standardized. The moment someone helps solve a colleagues problem in another part of the business, this will take up time without direct benefits to the helpers business. Of course on a larger scale this does add value to the company as a whole. However, we see many cases where management does not want to allow people time to engage in such activities because the results do not add directly to their bottom line. If people aren’t given enough freedom and time to engage you will be dependent on those that will engage in their own time. Ask yourself if that group is large enough to make your community vibrant.

Transparency

The use of enterprise 2.0 technology within your company will increase transparency in your organization. It will be more transparent who is competent in certain areas and who contributes. It will also be more transparent how decisions are made. There are many people within organizations that believe transparency will not benefit them. The resistance stems from the fact that people think they will be held accountable for certain actions or colleagues will think less of their competences than before. Because this barrier is so personal and threatening to people, you can expect them to put up a big fight against transparency.

Knowledge is power

There are people that hold their position because they have valuable knowledge. These people are often afraid to share because they believe it will make them obsolete. This barrier is also a fear barrier and hence very powerful.

Fear of stupidity or fear of being ignored

There is nothing worse than looking stupid or being ignored where everyone can see. This barrier has most impact in the initial stages of a community. If a community is not very vibrant yet, the barrier to engage with the community is larger than in situations with a lot of vibrancy. Have a close look at the people that are to engage in the activity to make sure the percentage of fearful people is not too large.

Negative marking of people

In many communities there is a small group of very active people. Especially in the early phases of a community you need to manage their activities a little bit. In the early stages the community often still has to prove its usefulness to the company. Skeptics and threatened people will be looking for ways to damage the initiative. An easy way to do so is to target enthusiastic people. In almost all communities I’ve seen, very active people are marked as “having nothing better to do.” Be prepared for this and subtly protect these people from themselves and the skeptics.

Confidentiality

The fact that confidential information could leak easier when using a community with so many people involved, is a valid concern but also an important weapon of the more skeptical people. It is the most heard reason for people not to engage.

Competition

Map out other community initiatives within the company and analyze if your community, when successful, will threaten them. Also talk to IT to establish if the platform you are likely to chose does not conflict with their plans. If so, plan to deal with it. There is nothing more deadly for a community than a change in technical platform for any reason other than an improvement for the community.

Management participation

As with everything you want to achieve within an enterprise, if management does not endorse the initiative, forget it.

If you are starting a community it is best to start the community with activities least hindered by the barriers described above. As the community becomes more vibrant and gains more trust you can start initiatives that have more barriers to overcome.

Of course there are strategies to deal with the barriers described here. I’ll write about these in the near future.

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We like the term ‘Connected Business’ as it better describes what this technology does. It is set of tools to break down silos in large enterprises and have their employees connect to one another. Employees that are connected to one another have access to each other’s knowledge, skills, and experience. This connectedness then leads to more problems being solved in less time and more innovative ideas being tested and enriched in less time. On the back off these advantages enterprises can save  money because there is less need to purchase knowledge through consultants and commissioned research.

So you become more operationally excellent because of the improved problem solving, you become more competitive because you become more innovative, and you get all this at lower costs. Yes, it’s as simple as that.

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The key value gain for enterprises that engage with social platforms is that employees are enabled to solve more problems, improve their practice and test or enrich new ideas.  All without raising the costs of doing so.

The knowledge and experience of thousands of colleagues can be easily accessed through a social platform. If you have an idea or a problem you can search the community for shared knowledge or discussions on that topic or find experienced colleagues by searching profiles or discussions they participated in.

Many enlightened enterprises have recognized these benefits, however most struggle to create and maintain vibrant communities on social platforms.

I recently wrote a post on the importance of addressing the “what’s in it for me?” question for potential users of an online community. If potential participants do not clearly see what they can get out of participation, they will not engage. We regularly run workshops with participants to identify how collaboration would add value for them, with who they would collaborate, and on what subject collaboration and sharing would add value.

If you have answered the “What’s in it for me?” question. There is another factor that has great influence on the potential success of an internal enterprise community. It  is related to the fact that enterprise 2.0 technology, or social media, help overcome a number of important barriers.

Firstly, space and time. If you have people in several different locations it is difficult and costly to bring everyone together to collaborate. It also makes it difficult for employees on different continents to know what their colleagues are up to. By having rich personal profiles, listing your projects, and having technology for online collaboration, you can lower the barrier of space and time significantly.

A second barrier has to do with the fact that, without tools, people are only capable of effectively networking with about 150 people. This phenomenon is often referred to as Dunbars’ threshold. Online networked communities can help overcome Dunbars’ threshold by what is called ‘loose ties’. An on-line community with loose ties and search capability can let you access a multitude of other peoples skills and experience, beyond the scope of your physical network of 150.

Imagine you have a problem or an idea; you can enter a community and do a very focussed search on profiles within the community, quickly identifying relevant people to talk to. You can also ask the community an open question and the people with the relevant knowledge will reply. Finally, and Linked-In is a good example of this, you can have loose connections with a large number of people. The platform then updates you periodically of all the activities of the people in your network.

For the third barrier we go back to Dunbars’ threshold. It is the reason why small companies are able to have successful collaboration and large enterprises struggle. W.L. Gore is an example of a company that is very collaborative and innovative. To maintain this level of collaboration they cut up any business unit that grows over 150 people.

The traditional answer of most governments and enterprises to this issue has been hierarchies. With hierarchies Dunbars’ problem can also be solved. When it comes to collaboration and innovation hierarchies also have a number of significant downsides. The main reason hierarchies hold back collaboration is that communication needs to travel great distances, up and down the ranks, to reach it’s destination. Add to that the fact that there is a lot of internal competition, power play,  politics and there is a big barrier to surmount if collaboration (and innovation) is to occur. Communities can help get around this barrier because the participants interact directly without having to work through the hierarchies. We call this the democracy of participation.

When companies plan to start a community, the barriers are often overlooked. Having defined the “What’s in it for me?” question and created a list of things people will do together on the platform, you need to test all of them to see if they actually lower one or more barriers. The more barriers are lowered, the better your chance of creating a vibrant community.

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If it isn’t clear to an employee how he or she will benefit from collaborating with others on an internal community, most will simply not engage. Add to that the fear of asking a ’stupid question’, not giving the ‘right answer’, or being ignored when asking a question and internal communities often quickly grind to a halt.

We use a simple slogan when we help enterprises set up communities: ‘People Doing Things Together.’ When setting up a community, you need to go into a great level of detail defining this and make sure they valuable. The definitions can be generalizations or actual examples. The more focused, the easier it will be to show potential users ‘what’s in it for them’ and get them engaged.

Some examples:

• Product managers ask for available market research for a new concept they have.
• Marketeers test a new proposition amongst peers.
• R&D tests the market potential of a new application with marketing and sales colleagues all over the world.
• Controllers share and discuss their annual budgeting spreadsheets to get best practices for next years budgeting rounds.
• HR searches the community for a person suitable for a certain role based on expertise and experience shown in peoples’ community activities.
• A product manager wants to make a manufacturing investment but his market will not give him sufficient revenue to justify the investment. He asks product managers in other markets for their potential revenue. Their combined markets may justify the investment.
• An insurance product manager in Belgium asks his colleagues in The Netherlands if they have implemented a specific coverage in their insurance, and if they have how it was done and what the result was.
• Before testing his new campaign in an expensive survey, a marketeer tests the campaign, at no costs, in his own organization.

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“Embracing open innovation and new business models  Nestle clearly recognizes that to achieve its growth objective it must extend its internal capabilities to establish a large number of strategic partnering relationships.  It has embraced open innovation and works aggressively with strategic partners to co-create significant new market and product opportunities.  Worldwide, Nestle employs approximate 5000 people in 24 R&D centers and over 250 application groups.  It extends its reach by tapping into the technologies and expertise of more than a million researchers around the world.

Importance of strategic focus within target benefit areas  Nestle has a very clear framework to screen new opportunities.  It has identified target benefit areas that relate to nutrition, compliance and quality, and taste.  In order for any idea to be pursued it must be strategically aligned with one of the identified target benefit areas.

Building partnerships based on trust and goodwill  Nestle has developed an internal culture based on a “sharing is winning” philosophy and recognizes that big growth opportunities can only be co-created with partners if the relationship is based on a strong foundation of trust and goodwill.

Upfront clarity on how IP is handled   Nestle recognizes that how IP is shared is often a key determinant in moving innovation partnership discussions forward.  The company makes its framework for sharing IP very clear early in the conversation so there is no expectations gap.   While there may be exceptional cases the norm is that every physical solution, such as ingredients or technologies, is owned by the competency providing organization.  In turn, the smart applications of a new solution are owned by Nestle for the period specified in the individual agreement.   Partners know Nestle’s expectations right up front which enables a more efficient partnership evaluation process.

Importance of program management and discipline  Just the raw number of discussions at various stages in the partnership life cycle to drive the growth Nestle is trying to achieve is only possible with strong program management capabilities and rigorous discipline build into the decision making process.”

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Why Idea Management systems underperform
Although idea management systems are seen as a crucial driver for large organisations to become more innovative, they have to be seen as a tool supporting ‘a more widespread organisational change. These systems need to support a process and an organisation, not the other way around. There are scores of cases of companies that buy and deploy a system without the required consideration given to what needs to be in place for such a system to deliver its full value.

In our practice we most often see idea management systems being deployed with a lack of focus. The organisation has not scoped the problem(s) they want to be solved and identified the people that should  participate in solving them. If you open up the system to a large group of people without a clear question many employees will enter the ideas they have been walking around with and couldn’t sell. This creates a tsunami of poor ideas overwhelming management that cannot evaluate properly because they do not have the capacity to do so. Because the quality of the ideas is low management will not increase resources to evaluate the ideas. This results in neither being able to evaluate ideas properly, give feedback to employees, nor find the good ideas. The lack of feedback leads to disgruntled employees who feel the organisation is not taking them and their ideas seriously. The lack of good ideas lead to disgruntled senior management that feels they are wasting budget. On average such implementations do not last very long.

This wouldn’t be such an issue if you could stop, rethink and try again. However, you have just lost your employees trust. The organisation will need years to forget that, in their eyes, their ideas have gone to waste.

Gary Hamel wrote the following analogy to playing Golf in an article called Innovation Hacker:

“Imagine that you coaxed a keen, but woefully inexperienced golfer onto the first tee at Pebble Beach. After arming the tyro with the latest titanium driver, you challenge him to split the fairway with a monster drive. You promise the neophyte a $100 bonus every time he hits a long bomb that stays out of the rough, and another $100 for every hole where he manages to break par. But what you don’t do is this: You don’t give him any instruction—no books, no tips from Golf Digest, no Dave Pelz and Butch Harmon, no video feedback, and no time off to perfect his swing on the practice range. Given this scenario, how many 200-yard drives is our beginner likely to land in the fairway? How long is he likely to stay avidly devoted to the task at hand? And what kind of return are you likely to get on the $2,000 you spent on a bag full of high tech clubs and the 450 bucks you shelled out for a tee time? The answers are: Not many, not long, and not much. And no one who knows anything about golf would ever set up such a half-assed contest.”

So how do you set up idea management?

1- Focus

What are you trying to achieve?

There are many valid reasons to drive ideas from a crowd. You may be particularly interested in the positive PR it generates, you can have an actual problem that needs solving, or you may want to transform your organisation to become truly innovative. You may also believe, like me, that nobody is as smart as everybody.  Each very valid perspectives, but each requiring fundamentally different approaches. Choose!

What problem needs to be solved?

Well scoped and phrased projects deliver significantly better results. Ask the right question, and you’ll get significantly better answers. Spend a significant amount of time getting this right.

Who are you going to ask for ideas?

Different target groups require a different approach and will generate different ideas. For example, if you are targeting experts you can set a slightly wider scope, can ask a more difficult question, can supply greater amounts of background information, and can rely on peer acknowledgment far more then when you are addressing your entire employee base. Furthermore, you can expect well thought out and described ideas. Such a project will be set-up significantly different than a project aimed at all your staff.

Who is asking?

When a project is genuinely solving someone’s problem people are more inclined to help. Both the problem and the person having the problem should be genuine. Needless to say (genuine) support from executives will help. The word ‘genuine’ is overused on purpose. Your asking an investment from people in your problem, take it seriously!

Who do you need on your team?

Given the answers to the above questions, you will need a team to manage the project. You will need a mix of the following skills: communication skills, skills to make the project (seem) lively and vibrant, skills to coach and motivate participants, and skills to select ideas.

What are the criteria you will use for selection?

There are a number of parameters influencing the use of selection criteria. The idea you are looking for will be somewhere on the scale between close to current business and “radical innovation”. Selection criteria for radical innovations will neither be numerous nor precise, while criteria closer to existing business will be. Another parameter influencing criteria is the target group. The more “expert” your audience, the more criteria you can lay on them. We always advise to communicate your criteria and ask people to explicitly deal with the criteria to improve the quality of the selection process.

How will you reward people?

This is a difficult and much debated issue. Rewards differ from plain peer group appreciation to winning large prizes. Rewards need to be addressed in an ideation project and they need to be appropriate to you organisations culture and ethos.

2- Preparation

Finalise the phrasing of the question. Revisit the question of what problem you are trying to solve, having in mind the above subjects. Is it still sufficiently scoped and precise?

Draft a communication plan. Depending on the above choices you will need to communicate with your target group before, during, and after the project. Draft 3 scenarios. Plan for a low response, an expected response, and for a high response.

In the focus phase you have described your team. You will probably need commitment from people to help you. You may need experts that can help you evaluate or enrich ideas, you may need executives to sponsor your initiative, or the communication department for PR. Get their commitment and train them for the project.

Set up your idea management system. If you are involving a large group of people, you will need a system to automate the workflow and store the ideas.

3- Running the project

When all is set, send out the invitations to the participants or communicate the start of the project in another manner. Methods vary from an email,  press releases, to large kick-off events.

Monitor the quality of the ideas. More important than the number of ideas is the quality. There are two types of quality. The first type is the level in which the ideas solve your problem. The second is whether ideas are phrased well enough to be evaluated. If the first type of quality is not sufficient, your scoping needs attention. If the second type of quality is lacking, you will need to start returning ideas and coach people on expressing themselves.

In your plan you have set goals for the number of ideas coming in and planned action when these goals are not met. During the project you need to monitor the number of ideas coming in and take appropriate action when needed.

Monitor the user discussion about ideas. These discussions can lead to interesting insights you can use in your communication. You also need to monitor for negative sentiment and react to them when they occur.

Depending on the nature and size of the project, organising off line events can help keep the project vibrant and keep the buzz alive.

4- Evaluation and Selection phase

Communicate the closing of the project and communicate the number of ideas received. Select the ideas based on the defined criteria. You can chose to use a system for the selection process or plan a selection workshop. When the ideas are not too numerous a selection workshop is most suitable. A system works well to handle large workloads and helps to log the decision process.

We recommend to plan the follow up on the selected ideas and include that in the communication about the selected ideas. The feeling of having contributed is an important driver for participants to contribute in future projects.

Conclusion
Implementing effective Idea Management is about asking the right people the right questions. Then training and coaching them to become effective at answering them. There are also great software tools to support Idea Management. However, focussing on the tools alone is detrimental to the overall success of idea management.

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In short, if you have an idea at W.L. Gore you are free to pursue it, although with such discipline that results from normal work are not jeopardized. There are no formal processes to guide these innovations. ‘All’ you need to do is to convince your colleagues about the potential value of your idea and get their help.

The mechanism is quite simple. Ideas with high perceived value will get a lot of support and bad ideas will not get support and vanish.

Working in this way W.L. Gore is able to scan great numbers of ideas and many are killed in an early stage and in a natural way.

The result is that W.L Gore is a very healthy company, is viewed as one of the most innovative companies in the world, and has been consistently ranked high in the lists of best places to work.

We use parts of the Gore vision at our clients a lot to improve the way they innovate.

I came across a presentation of W.L. Gore’s CEO, Terri Kelly, for MIT Sloan School of management. They summarized her talk as follows:

“A lot of companies ask about ’How do you innovate ? What do you invest in R&D?’ They’re not really the right questions to ask. We would flip that and talk more around ‘How do we create the right environment where collaboration happens naturally — that people actually want to work together, that they actually like to be part of something greater than just the individual contribution?’ And if you get that part right, all the other pieces fall in place that allow us to creat this great innovation cycle within Gore.”

Here is the entire 55 minute presentation. It is absolutely worthwhile to watch!

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Google 20% rule
The 20% rule stimulates the entrepreneurial level of the employees, since they can openly work on side projects. Also, people tend to be productive when they work on things they see as important or have invented, or are working on something they are passionate about. Probably a company even attracts more entrepreneurial-minded employees. When employees can only work on their side projects at home you run the risk that an idea will either fail from a lack of resources or succeeds to the point that they quit to pursue it full time. So Google gives them the freedom to spend one day a week on an idea they are passionate about without having to worry whether the idea fits into the company or even if money could be made with it.

A lot of people think that the first company to introduce the 20% rule was Google, but it has a famous predecessor. Many years before Google even existed, 3M decided to stimulate innovation by directing its engineers to spend 15% of their paid time on projects of their own choosing. Among other things, this extra time yielded the idea for Post-it Notes.

The real innovation stimulus
Sure, the 20% stimulus is a good way to get more ideas out of your employees, and therefore stimulates bottom-up innovation. However, the real bottleneck we see at a lot of companies is not generating ideas, but effectively selecting and developing the right ideas. This is the point were the culture and work philosophy of truly innovative companies like Google comes into play; as written in the book The Google Story, “People talk over lunch about the things they are playing with, it is like they are the CEO of their own little company. Once an idea matures a little bit, they tend to talk about it in a more public forum. One way of circulating word about what they are doing is through bulletin boards on Google’s internal computer network, but the company also sets aside time for peer reviews where engineers can receive feedback on their budding ideas.” Positive feedback implies other people are willing to work with you, and you have the prerequisite for a project. In the end some ideas will get funded and management makes sure that the project sees the daylight. The strength in this approach lies in the fact that employees actually work as entrepreneurs within the company; when they need marketing information, they go to a marketing specialist, when they need technical feedback, they simply get it. All this cross-functional feedback and collaboration comes without hierarchical constraints, another innovation enabler.

Google News
The innovation process of Google is nicely described in the book by the development of Google News. Initially it was the idea and little project of a guy named Krishna Bharat, at the time a 31-year-old software engineer. By late 2001 he was working with two other Googlers to build a working demo, which was released within the company to gauge reaction from others. He already new it was popular, since he got a lot of feedback from engineers, but then suddenly Eric Schmidt (the CEO) walked into his office and said he was really interested and wanted to make it happen. Then, subsequently he spoke to Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the founders of Google), and they were also very interested. Bharat’s 20-percent-time project turned into a full-time endeavor; it received the resources necessary to take the demo and built it into a real product.

Innovation funnel
At Google many ideas are generated through the 20 percent time but because it is not possible to take al the ideas and make them products, an innovation funnel is in place. The culture in which this process takes place, is well described by a remark of one of the employees: “The intrapersonal environment at Google is very energizing. When someone comes up with a new idea, the most common response is excitement and a brainstorming session. Politics and who owns what rarely enter into it.” Just check the number of successful new product launches of Google when you question whether they do a good job innovating.

Other companies
The next question is of course: Can we copy this Google approach to other companies? It is possible, but it is far from easy; it is not simply a case of introducing the 20% rule. As I mentioned earlier, the culture and work philosophy are crucial. Create and foster an environment where people can easily walk into the office of other employees for feedback and advice and definitely use online tools that enable this process too. Involve top management in this process as well. Bring the innovation funnel in practice within your company. In the end, employees should be working like entrepreneurs within your company. Not everybody has the attitude to work like that, so stimulate entrepreneurship by training your employees.

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Le Roi Soleil
Let’s start off with a short history lesson. The record for the longest documented rule for any European monarch to date is held by Louis XIV who reigned as King of France from 1642 until 1715. He celebrated great military success in the Franco-Dutch war, was a patron of the arts and spent abundantly on artists who, as a result, produced work that remains influential to this very day. He commissioned the Palace of Versailles; a splendrous court spanning 800 acres, which is one of the largest castles in the world, and is on the UNESCO World Heritage list. He was also responsible for creating a centralised French state, governed from the capital, and thus eradicating the remnants of feudalism. For much of Louis’s reign, Versailles was the centre of power in Europe. He was popularly known as The Sun King, referring to the notion that, similar to the planets revolving around the Sun, so too should France and the court revolve around him. All in all, he could be considered one of the greatest rulers in history.

The extravagant riches he and his court lavished in, however, are a stark contrast with the relative poverty of the people of France. His numerous wars and excessive spending effectively bankrupted the state. Due to his meddling in foreign politics, an increasing number of coalitions seeking to overthrow the snobbish king were formed throughout Europe. When he finally died in 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, he allegedly instilled the following onto his young successor Louis XV:

“Do not follow the bad example which I have set you; I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and may you apply yourself principally to the alleviation of the burdens of your subjects”. 

Under foreign and domestic pressure, his successors were not able to sustain Louis XIV’s government. 74 years after his death, the ancient regime was overthrown, ringing in the start of the French Revolution.

Open Government
Fast-forward three centuries. In the Open Government initiative, American citizens are invited to tell their story, the issues that matter to them, and share their concerns, hopes and policies they want to see carried out. While there is no guarantee that anything will be done with these contributions, at the very least Barack Obama sends out a very important message. In his own words:

“I ask you to believe – not just in my ability to bring about change, but in yours.”

Unlike other presidential candidates, Barack Obama did not solely rely on the social elite for backing. He turned to everyday people. Besides an unprecedented sum of over $650M in campaign funds, this resulted in a thing of far greater value: the support of the public!

Two types of executives
How do these examples of Louis XIV and Barack Obama relate to companies striving to become more innovative? While there are many similarities between company politics and country politics, I would like to focus on leadership. In organisations, both large and small, we can distinguish between the same two types of people:

Rulers: I know everything better then you do. I tell other people what to do, how, and when to do it, because I’m the boss. I will get rid of you if you don’t agree with me. I respect people in more powerful positions then me. I doubt other people’s opinions and ideas. I keep juniors, subordinates, and ‘crazy people’ down. I deserve praise and reward for my accomplishments. I am never to blame for failure. I am afraid for my reputation and position of power, which I attained by bragging and bluffing. I start all my sentences with the same letter.

Leaders: All the people in the world together know far more then I do. Everyone deserves respect, regardless of their position. People that have a fresh and unusual view can provide valuable insights. Sharing with, and learning from others is not scary. Investing in a durably successful organisation is most important. Failure is a chance to learn. Doing a good job and making sure others can do a good job as well is most important.

As you might have noticed, the above is somewhat polarised for the sake of argument. Additionally, it is important to note that ‘rulers’ are not necessarily obnoxious or conservative people. Several of them are actually highly innovative and successful individuals. Their personal successes are, however, quite irrelevant. Real innovation leaders bring an entire organisation, including the people in it, to a higher level of  innovativeness. An entire organisation being innovative is always more valuable and more sustainable then one person directing innovation from the throne. And, although plain old fashioned good luck is quite important, there is much evidence that truly innovative organisations continuously outperform their less innovative competitors.

Just as any company needs to be innovative and open to achieve a sustainable growth, so should the leaders of these companies. After all, when even the new president of the United States is not afraid to listen, why should the leader of any organisation be? My next blog article will give some tips on how to be an innovative leader.

So do you know any examples of either type? And which type are you?

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