Democratizing Innovation in Organizations

How to Unleash the Power of Collaboration

Philippe Davidson

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110684032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Managers often isolate their innovation teams, but wouldn't it be better to engage all the workers in innovation? This book describes a framework that makes innovation a daily consideration for all. It involves allowing a knowledge network to develop naturally which complements the existing organizational structure making it more organic. It fosters more extensive collaboration amongst workers to produce more imaginative solutions that maximize value. The workers are encouraged to consult one another spontaneously across their organization and beyond its traditional boundaries. Insightful and constructive exchanges stimulate their thinking making them creative partners. Unsuspected capabilities, ideas and value are revealed.

Philippe Davidson describes creative deliberation techniques designed to maximize stakeholder value. The framework also makes organizations nimbler and more resilient to market changes. They become more sustainable in ever-changing conditions because learning and change become the norm. Innovation champions will find powerful arguments for introducing democratized innovation in their organizations. A wealth of practical techniques and handy tips for participative work-based training will help organizational trainers and facilitators to democratize innovation. Management consultants will find invaluable insights to advise their clients on innovation. Your workers are your organization's best agents of change - unleash their natural creativity!

Part 1: The Framework

We start by examining how to develop a democratized-innovation capability throughout an organization. Innovation should become a natural reflex and a skill that is readily exercised by all the workers in their day-to-day activities. They should constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to innovate. Democratized innovation increases the chances that they will enthusiastically engage in innovation. Then we investigate how decision-making should be carried out to maximize the value created from the collaborative team effort. Negotiation techniques that apply in the context of group creativity are investigated. We examine how collaborative innovation can be scripted to induce repeatability and reliability while maintaining the flexibility required for free-flowing exchanges. These scripts once modelled can guide the regular workers turned into democratized innovators through the complexity of carrying out collaborative deliberations about their innovation initiatives. They produce more predictability in the otherwise ambiguous innovation process. We review a step-by-step process to establish an organization’s particular implementation of ‘the Framework’ (which is the abbreviation for “democratized-innovation framework” that we will be using henceforth). Since organizations increasingly need to reach out to external associates to carry out their innovation projects, the extension of the Framework beyond the traditional delimitations of an organization is examined with a particular attention to the control of the organization’s sensitive information.

Chapter 1 Democratized Innovation

Before investigating how innovation can be democratized in organizations, let us review why traditional top-down decision-making in innovation no longer produces the best results in an increasingly challenging business context.

How can communications on innovation strategy foster innovation?

An organization’s strategy should include a description of how it plans to innovate. This innovation strategy will guide the decisions made, the resources deployed, and the actions applied to materialize the innovation. All these considerations need to be diligently organized and managed to create the value that the organization’s customers or its internal stakeholders want. Thus, defining the innovation strategy as part of the organization’s strategic planning is a mandatory starting point. With the traditional approach, this task is the exclusive responsibility and prerogative of the organization’s senior managers. Because of the disconnection with the regular workers, the strategy then needs to be communicated to them. This must be done with the utmost care because the strategy may adversely impact them. The release of information is tightly controlled; it may be disclosed only to the affected workers, but it is usually easier to communicate it to all the workers at the same time to project coherence. Communicating one’s strategy means selling the underlying vision and inspiring the workers. Also, the workers need to understand its practical implications. The workers are the ones who will make it happen despite their not having been consulted about it beforehand; their enthusiastic engagement is important but often hard to obtain. Their concerns must be alleviated. Allowing the ambiguity to linger on may be disconcerting and possibly damaging. The strategy may be of limited scope or on the contrary represent a significant reorientation of the organization’s priorities and activities. In the latter case, it could also be disclosed as a grandiose revelation orchestrated in a way that inspires and even mesmerizes the workers to imagine a “new bold future” for the organization possibly even one that would be a little daunting but that would instill an awe-inspiring sense of purpose and pride. Such an ambitious goal would have the effect of boosting the workers’ motivation by allowing them to transcend the humdrum of their daily routines.

However, let us not forget the dark side of any organizational change which all too often translates into lay offs when the required new skills don’t perfectly align with the ones that the workers currently master. Selling a vision to a small and targeted group is certainly more effective, since a common set of motivations and interests are easier to identify and to excite than to a larger audience that may comprise several departmental affiliations with their own agendas and special interests. However, with an incremental approach, word of a planned reorientation may come out anyway and spread to the wider audience in an uncontrolled manner which could foster misinformation and mistrust especially if workers suspect that their jobs and livelihoods may be at stake. Rumours of up-coming reorientations of the business’ activities will be interpreted as being restructuring that will inevitably raise concerns and cause turmoil in the organization. It goes without saying that a primary consideration that will inevitably be on every worker’s mind is whether the strategy involves them at all, which may understandably foster anxieties. Mishandling this announcement may cause issues and concerns with rumors distorting reality which could hinder the later attempts to win over the workers’ support. For all these reasons, worker buy-in is essential to implement the innovation strategy successfully. Is there a better way? Despite upfront efforts and costs, there are significant advantages in engaging the organization’s regular workers early in the innovation process. Soliciting input and feedback can go a long way towards fostering the trust and the engagement necessary to ensure an innovation strategy’s ultimate success; they won’t argue against something that they took part in creating. This should be done not only to secure the workers’ support, but because they can usefully contribute to the reflections about innovation. These upfront consultations should be viewed as being early preparations that will facilitate the later integration of the changes in the mainstream operations with the benefits of reducing the typical surprises, anxieties, and resistance to change. In addition, it allows to undertake any required staff training early on. Obviously, not every worker can be removed from his or her regular assignments to work on innovation projects, but all workers can acquire a feeling of involvement even if it is simply being aware of the innovation initiatives and a feeling that they are part of a forward-thinking organization. In practice, they need to be encouraged to continuously be on the lookout for ways to innovate by improving on their regular tasks and making and reporting unusual observations that could lead to discoveries.

Overall, the corporate culture needs to be adapted to ensure that change isn’t viewed as inauspicious, but rather as an innocuous process that occurs regularly, if not continuously, and that one can expect. Change, whether it is evolutionary or revolutionary, must become the norm; being on the standstill should be what is perceived as being an abnormality. Faced with continuous change, a responsive organization should actively retrain its staff whenever possible, which may provide many opportunities for worker self-actualization and professional fulfillment.

Hence, we contend that innovating in a way that is disassociated from the organization’s workers is a misguided approach because it ignores the importance of the numerous considerations relating to the integration of novelties which may compromise the value that is sought. Furthermore, in doing so the organizations’ senior managers ignore an invaluable source of ideas, experience and feedback, that is readily available amongst their regular workers. Rather than communicating strategic decisions after the fact, informing and consulting regular workers early on is more effective in the long run. Moreover, innovativeness is more than the simple sum of each worker’s individual inventiveness; it is a holistic function within an organization. A vibrant culture of innovation should involve all workers as active participants.

How can regular operations and exploratory activities be balanced?

Performing regular operations that apply current know-how and techniques is what is referred to as exploitation. Traditionally, separating a team mandated with the development of a novelty from the regular workers was a common practice. This approach addressed the most common concerns, such as avoiding any disruptions to the current business processes and production, and preventing the stakeholders associated with regular operations from unwittingly stifling the development of new ideas by resisting change because it could affect their ability to produce. For these reasons, separate organizational entities are created to house the innovation initiatives or distinctive new brands are inaugurated. They are established to clearly distinguish them from regular production. An innovation strategy that involves emerging technologies or new business paradigms usually means ambiguity and risk. Many components underpinning the innovation strategy may first need to be worked out, perfected, developed, and tested before it is ready to be integrated into the organization’s regular operations. On occasion, the novelty may even cannibalize existing products or services establishing an uneasy form of internal competition. This concern is often used as an excuse to justify delaying the disclosure of the novelty to other parts of the organization or to its customers. Its implementation in its regular operations may be postponed until the uncertainties surrounding it are fully resolved. Its opportunity and value must be confirmed beyond any doubt. The rationale for doing so is easy to understand; change can cause disruption, possibly even turmoil, that could interfere with the proper performance of the production processes involved in the exploitation of the organization’s current assets both tangible and intangible; these processes are the very livelihood of the organization. The mismanagement of the novelty’s integration may interfere with the proper operations of the organization’s activities and have a detrimental impact. Therefore, engaging in change must be carefully planned out before it is executed; dithering and worse backtracking could be even more disruptive than the originally planned integration process; it should be avoided.

Organizations often exhibit a negative bias against projects that are perceived as being risky or prone to long delays before reaching profitability. Planning projects that involve emerging technologies is also challenging because their feasibility and their impacts are harder to predict. More often than not, decision-makers naturally shy away from the uncertainties of exploration which means that innovative projects are often systematically ranked unfavorably compared to projects that involve familiar technologies or techniques for which the outcomes and returns can be estimated more accurately and more reliably. In addition, novelties may at first temporarily underperform while the quirks are worked out and while related supporting processes are being established – a weakness which may be derided by some critical workers. Indeed, they may resist, defy, and even disparage a novelty that they perceive as being a threat. Interestingly, resistance to change may also foster a form of defensive innovation based on incremental improvements of the current technology that may extend its lifespan for a little while longer. This is a source of innovation that may prove useful when unforeseen issues with a novelty cause delays in its deployment. In addition, customers may hold off purchasing an organization’s products if it is rumoured that a better version is in the works. Word of improved upcoming versions may stall the sales of current versions. To avoid these situations from occurring when the novelty is still at an early stage, organizations often elect to keep the exploration of novelties separated from the rest of the organization, possibly even conducting the exploration covertly that is to say without the regular workers nor even its customers being aware of it. In addition, exploration teams are often shielded from what may be viewed as being tedious constraints of production because it is feared that they could restrain the innovation team’s creativity. Simplifying the problem is often a useful tactic when experimenting with a novelty but scaling of a proof of concept later may create a difficult hurdle over which to jump; it could even compromise the innovation project’s success in case the initial approach doesn’t scale.

Ambidexterity in the context of an organization refers to its ability to balance its exploitative and the exploratory activities. Ambidexterity is sequential when the innovation team is temporarily removed from the rest of the organization while it conducts exploratory work and reintegrated in the organization when it has completed it. When the organization’s workers are allowed to exercise their own judgement in deciding whether to engage in exploitation tasks or in exploratory ones, it is said to be ‘contextual‘ (Birkinshaw and Gibson 2004). ‘Harmonic ambidexterity‘ involves the concurrent pursuit of exploitation and exploration. Allowing workers to deviate from standard operating procedures as they develop their proficiency at a new task and as they find better ways to carry it out are examples of this type of ambidexterity. Generally, involving regular workers who instigate, launch and undertake innovation initiatives makes the balance between exploration and exploitation contextual since they implicitly adapt novelties to their reality and to their evolving needs. There are other typologies of ambidexterity that reflect when exploration is carried out in the workers’ schedules and whether the resources involved are permanently dedicated to research and development. Staff members who work part-time on innovation projects exercise temporal ambidexterity, while a permanent research and development department is a structural one.

In designing the Framework, we were guided by the goal of establishing an environment in which innovation initiatives coming from the organization’s ranks can flourish. Regular workers who identify an opportunity for innovation become the instigators and owners of their projects; also, they are accountable for them. To realize their projects, they may work part-time on them or draw on other internal resources in a matrix organizational structure to undertake larger ones; these consultations are an application of temporal ambidexterity. The project may require competencies that are foreign to the organization; in which case it will need to call on external contributors. Thus, blending several perspectives together one may end up with a hybrid form of ambidexterity, which reflects the fact that the Framework is flexible enough to be added to any existing organizational structure.

The Framework is mostly an application of contextual and harmonic ambidexterity with workers instigating innovation projects and remaining on the lookout for opportunities to improve on their work. They keep their eyes open for any observations and information that could trigger discoveries and inventions. These could be the result of purposeful inquiries and experimentation or mere chance. In addition, we believe that they should have an active role in setting the orientation of innovation in their organizations. They should be invited to bring their ideas forward and to freely, albeit respectfully, critique the other workers’ ideas. Also, workers should seek advice from others in a casual manner. Operations teams that find efficiencies relating to the activities that they perform together should share their insights with other groups. There must be an allowance for them to participate in other workers’ innovation projects when invited to do so. This participative, collaborative and networked framework means that all regular workers are de-facto democratized innovators.

How does collaboration come into play in democratized innovation?

A novelty is more than a technology, a technique, a procedure or a mechanism. It is a blend of its intrinsic features with special-purpose know-how, practices and processes developed especially for the context in which it will be used. Some of these supporting assets may be codified; others are tacit which means that they are difficult to transfer from one worker to another by any other means than by coaching and mentoring. Developing these complementary knowledge assets usually takes extensive time. This justifies consulting and integrating an organization’s regular workers who know the ins and outs of its operations and business processes when developing innovation initiatives. They are the one’s who make a novelty work in an organization’s operations by adapting its generic features to the organization’s needs. This integration is critically important for the ultimate success of an innovation project because it is at that stage that the novelty is converted into a value-generating innovation for real users. Furthermore, the regular workers may improve on it as they use it in effect exercising harmonic ambidexterity without necessarily being aware that they are doing so. Hence, the regular workers should be active participants in the innovation process. They should be engaged as early as possible to provide the insights into the business and operational processes, and to develop the complementary assets as early as possible. Managing knowledge assets shouldn’t be confused with intellectual property (IP) management that simply formalizes knowledge ownership.

It is widely recognized that groups are more creative than individuals working in isolation (Davidson 2019a, 2019b). Furthermore, rather than sporadically isolating innovators and innovation teams only to reintegrate them with the novelty in the organization at a later date, all the organization should be proactively engaged in innovation as a regular preoccupation and activity. Senior management must establish a global culture of innovativeness, which means developing a capability to recognize, to capture, to trace, to relate, to prioritize, to diffuse and, especially, to reward the contributions to innovation made throughout the worker community. Innovativeness must be elevated to the level of a sought-after ability that every worker aspires to attain, and that the organization recognizes and even celebrates as one of the principal factors of its success.

A team of people can bring insights beyond the imagination of individuals. A greater number of minds, each with different backgrounds, experiences and viewpoints will generate a larger number of ideas and, generally, more creative ones. The exploratory group discussions challenge its participants to formulate their ideas and their thoughts clearly to communicate them effectively to others. The group works its way through incremental refinements and improvements by means of an exchange of proposals and arguments. The discussions are creative and even vibrant to eventually reach what Sawyer (2007) calls “in-flow im...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Framework
• Part 2: The Domain Knowledge
• Part 3: The Training
• Index