Collaborative innovation: It’s all the rage. At least, circling flocks of global management gurus are now being paid mountains of money to tell us so.
But how do you get people to innovate together when they can’t even agree on where to put the office coffee machine? And how is it that in their day, Edison, da Vinci, and Newton managed to develop world-bedazzling ideas without the help of high-tech, cross-fertilizing, partner-rich, collaborative ”think-ins.”
Of course, those luminaries weren’t entirely alone in their pursuits. Geniuses, perhaps, but all were also part of small groups of forward-thinking individuals, the learned art sets, nascent Western learning academies, professional societies, smoke-filled coffee houses, and educated evening soirees of their times. Maybe they were just the guys who made it into the history books and became famous.
And today the complexity of innovation challenges and new product development — whether a new pharmaceutical breakthrough or a unique engineering vision — is often so vast and deep that any individual brain is likely to collapse under a flood of multi-dimensional data before it ever gets the chance to process a creative thought into a real innovative development. What’s more, an idea is only a seed that must be turned into something practical that people can use, or apply, or even buy at their local store to enhance their lives. And that takes a lot more than a single Eureka moment.
Clearly, if we don’t start collaborating more effectively, we won’t be creating, or at least spotting, the truly valuable innovations that we need to keep global industries moving forward.
But does this really mean we now must spend all our time building multi-layered, corporate-wide innovation programs to get these new ideas into action? Are these really all you need?
Maybe we should keep in mind the essential power of personal creativity, making more of an effort to foster an atmosphere in which individual brilliance is fairly acknowledged and encouraged. That may keep us from becoming overly obsessed with structured corporate processes that we feebly hope will result in a flow of ground-breaking sparks of invention that will suddenly deliver competitive salvation.
Seems to me that no matter how you may formalize innovation structures, ultimately you still need the odd enlightened genius or two to really make transformational innovation a reality.
Ultimately, the future depends on the spirit of innovation, and the natural sense of collaboration, in the hearts and minds of the individuals in your organization.
Processes may help. But let the people shine.
