Innovation and Collaboration in the Digital Era

The Role of Emotional Intelligence for Innovation Leadership and Collaborative Innovation

Jara Pascual

• Verlag: De Gruyter
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110665567
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Betriebswirtschaft
• Thema: Unternehmertum

Innovation and Collaboration in the Digital Era provides a holistic approach to collaborative innovation, innovation management and innovation leadership. It is full of practical advice and includes 34 interviews with high-level politicians, innovation industry leaders, academics and entrepreneurs discussing the reality of innovation and how to create change for a positive impact. Many quotes are included from researchers and practitioners in the innovation field who have participated as guests in the author's podcast "Business of Collaboration" or in interviews with the Collabwith Magazine which she produces.

This is a powerful book full of practical frameworks and one-page canvases which act as reminders of the value of making needs and expectations explicit. The author provides frameworks and tools that can be used to support collaboration journeys across different sectors and organizations. She also offers clarity to the reader for their innovation journey and brings a new perspective on how to innovate and understand innovation.

Jara Pascual focuses on the importance of managing emotions and feelings of frustration which can be very common during a collaborative innovation process. She explores the interaction between Emotional Intelligence and business and shows how to remove and manage frustration and how to produce a positive outcome.

Innovation and Collaboration in the Digital Era will empower the reader to take action and show how to change your conversation about innovation and collaboration.
"Jara Pascual, with colleague Celia Avila-Rauch, has been able to distill and apply the ability model of emotional intelligence to the art and science of innovation and innovation leadership. In our work we note that feelings are not always facts but that emotions as a form of data. More than that, emotions can assist or facilitate with decision making, creativity and innovation rather than getting in the way, but only if leaders are "smart" about emotions and develop and deploy their emotional intelligence skills." Dr David R Caruso, Emotional Intelligence Skills Group, Founder Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Research Affiliate

“Innovation leadership is as if you are a CEO without having the power of a CEO”

Jara Pascual

Chapter 9 Innovation Leadership – Make it Happen!

Summary

In this chapter you will learn about the importance of leadership to drive innovation and that for leading innovation you need specific leadership skills, including emotional intelligence, to make effective impact and change.

Innovation leadership is using innovation as a transformative tool to make impact. For many years this was called only innovation or innovation management. But innovation management is when you focus on managing your innovation process, and your team.

When there were conversations about organization and innovation then the predominant term used to be “innovation culture”. This can be a mistake, because it creates tension and friction between the “innovation team’s” and the “senior management’s” responsibilities and effectiveness. When innovation is making an organizational and business transformation, that is because the rules of leadership are applied, and the correct term to be used is “innovation leadership”.

There are different ways to apply your leadership skills for innovation at the team level, at the organization level, when doing entrepreneurship (which means bringing an innovation to the market, not starting a normal business), at the level of society and industry. In all cases, you make a change, and the greater the change you make, the greater your leadership skills have to be. A leader for innovation is a transformational leader with kindness, with active-listening skills, with elevated levels of emotional intelligence and social intelligence. A leader who is making a change without having the power or authority to make the change happen. It is in this particular situation when the highest levels of leadership become necessary and when what exactly leadership means becomes clear.

Becoming a good leader for innovation has a natural part (“natural leader”), but it’s also a natural evolution of learning, growing as a person, experiencing, knowing about yourself, and growing with your cases, experiences and responsibilities. If you are a good leader for your team, then, when it comes to driving innovation for the organization, you can start using the same techniques and apply them or translate and adapt them for managing innovation at the organizational level. The same translation is applicable to becoming an entrepreneur if you have an innovation leadership background. Which leadership skills from innovation can you apply to transform your market? Which leadership skills do you have to learn? A good transformational leader is capable of adapting the skills required to the new circumstances with a clear mission related to the change, and a strategy for how to execute the change.

In the previous chapters, we talked about the importance of bringing people together, and how to enable collaboration for innovation. This chapter is on how a person and their leadership style can really make a difference in how the innovation is conceptualized, prototyped, implemented, created, brought to market, and adopted.

On a personal note, when I was doing an MBA at RSM Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and we had a class in change management, the professor said that change is very difficult to make. Only 30% of change management projects are successful. This was surprising for me because I had a good track record in doing transformations, so I started to analyze what I was doing differently from others, and the professor recommended reading the book The Heart of Change by John Kotter (Kotter, 2012). Again, I was surprised to see the importance of emotions and psychology for change and for being a transformational leader. When I was working as a senior manager in IT innovation, the first point I realized was that the departments and teams were working in silos, and “almost” hated each other. And for me, the most important step to innovate is to share knowledge, and that was not the case. The second problem was that people were untrusting vis-à-vis innovation and thinking that it was a joke or not important at all. The next issue was that there were no processes in place, or information about innovation – or any strategy at all. After six months (transforming people takes time) and after four years in the role, people in the department were collaborating with other teams, with business departments, sharing tons of ideas in our internal idea forum, collaborating with professors from universities, contacting startups, including innovation in their “performance review” and as an official key performance indicator (KPI). Innovation was trusted because I was trusted. I was people-oriented, with a focus on mission, strategy and strong emphasis on values and what is important.

One of the key messages I shared about innovation was that everyone is creative (Katz, 2003). This sentence helped me to make a statement with the IT colleagues who were reticent when it came to finding new ideas. On top of the conversations, I started working within the teams, meeting team members randomly to have informal coffee breaks with them and talking about their thoughts. The goal was to change the negative attitude towards innovation to a positive one. “The right people, the right attitudes” (Chan Kim, et al., 2001). My IT colleagues were the right people (Chan Kim, et al., 2001) – experts in their domains, full of knowledge and information for making new products for their employees, IT departments or other business units, but with no motivation and the wrong sentiment. It was particularly important to change their mindset because the IT teams were focused on “keeping systems running” and did their own daily work. They were tied up with their own tasks, working at full capacity, and they didn’t want to add extra time for innovation. One of the essential jobs was to change this mindset to a future-oriented mindset. Further, I introduced workshops, calls and small presentations from universities and other consulting companies where the conversation was about other ways of doing the same things, and future insights and trends from industry actors. At the beginning, people from different teams didn’t want to share the same workshop or room. So, I was receiving calls from the heads asking me why the other “colleagues” are invited. In order to avoid conflict at the first stage of change, I accepted the advice, and I did separate workshops for each team. Being a huge fan of Swedish startups and universities in the field of research, I knew about the power of an innovation café, and wanted to apply this technique to help people come together. The issue of a fragmented culture (Goffee, 1996) was impeding innovation. If the colleagues were not able to talk to each other or even share information cross teams, there was no chance to create a product together. For this reason, I created the “Freitag, Kaffee, Kuchen” (Fridays, Coffee, Cake) event in order to make people talk cross-team, cross-department and across business units. I organized an event every month the first year, and then every two weeks, inviting different people every time. I also baked a cake the day before. The setup was quite simple: an Outlook invitation, a normal meeting room, one hour, one cake, and pots of coffee and tea with cups. People were joining without a schedule or time pressure, and they were talking about project issues and other matters.

These events became more popular and complex when there was a topic to brainstorm on how to find ideas to solve an issue. This is an example of empathetic design (Katz, 2003), where “innovators” empathize with the users for whom they have to innovate and with whom they work. The idea was if the IT colleagues met the business and IT partners with their issues, they were more likely to create new products which will work for them and determine the trends to support disruptive innovation. Another outcome of these events was that if they have to work together, they have to be a good team. In order to force this success factor (Bohmer, 2004) in the potential teams (new teams were created to do a new project), they have to trust each other, be identified as a team and feel that they are working together efficiently towards the new idea. In this case, the goal was to make a prototype from an idea they generated together. The “Freitag, Kaffee, Kuchen” event was an incubator for crowdsourcing inside the company (Li, 2010). I saw how the business units were happier to create a separate budget for the new projects and ideas. IT teams were strongly focused on their KPIs based on the “keep systems running” approach. I talked directly with the SVP about how important it was to create a new KPI for innovation. Only one was needed – “be innovative by generating three ideas per team and one prototype.” Usually the research KPIs (Samsonowa, 2012) are more complex, a...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to the Collaboration Journey for Innovation
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• Let’s Keep Talking: The Business of Collaboration Podcast