Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Most people think of innovation as simply products and services. Innovation happens in all areas of the companies," said Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, and one of the speakers at yesterday's conference.

Reid and the other conference speakers tried to dispel that ingrained perception that innovation is strictly technology, but rather it's largely a collaboration among individuals, groups, and global organizations. The Xprize Foundation, a non-profit prize institute whose mission is to create breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity, aims at fostering innovation through collaboration. The foundation in the past has issued noteworthy prizes, including a $30 million Google Lunar prize, as well as a $10 million Progressive Insurance prize to a team that produced a clean, fuel-efficient vehicle that exceeded 100 mpg.

Yesterday's conference didn't discuss ways to land a robot on the moon, but it did get people talking and collaborating about how to encourage and foster innovation within their organizations and with other like-minded companies.

Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the Xprise Foundation, said his belief is that rewards accelerate innovation. However, organizations must also be culturally and organizationally ready for innovation. He lists six attributes that teams must possess to create maximum creative thinking:

1. Small groups: communication of knowledge is rapid and there's no bureaucracy. Hoffman said, "In small communities, there is lots of trust. In large ones, there is less trust."
2. Isolated environment: Isolated populations of employees are free to evolve new approaches without criticism. Judy Estrin, author of Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark Creativity in a Global Economy, said yesterday that enterprisewide innovation will depend a lot on individual innovation. "It is going to take a lot of personal innovation as people retrain and refocus...and adapt to that focus," she said.
3. New teams: New teams of individuals aren't saddled with pre-existing biases. Neil Blakesley, vice president of strategy, marketing, and propositions at BT Americas, said yesterday that companies must assess the attributes internally and make the necessary structural changes. "Secure the mindsets of the people who you want to get it done and continue to bring life to it," Blakesley said.
4. Diversity of background: Stovepipe mentality will often cause likeminded individuals to discount potentially fertile approaches. "One of the key things for innovation...is a wide variety of culture and legal issues to support innovation," Hoffman said.
5. Charismatic leadership: Existence of strong leader who promotes a "yes I can" attitude makes all the difference in keeping a group engaged. Estrin said that there are a number of different levers to pull to cultivate innovation. The two most important are leadership and culture. "They set the vision, establish resources, create the culture, and then get out of the way. In the end, innovation is bottoms up," she said.
6. Youth: The addition of youth is critical because they don't know what can't be done.

Above all, maintain a positive approach when fostering innovation because it affects people's creativity. "I think innovation is broader than any new product or service," Estrin said. "Innovation is a state of mind. It's whether a person or organization or country has the capacity for change. If you have change, you will have an environment where new things happen."