In the summer, professors get to read books they’re too busy to look at during the semester.  I’m now reading a classic 1983 book on business innovation: The Change Masters, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter.  It’s amazing that she gets everything right; her key points are in best-selling management books being published today.  (See my June 9th posting “How long will it take?” for another story about how long we’ve known how innovation really works.)

Kanter analyzed six companies in depth; four of them were innovators and two were not. Somewhat tongue in cheek, Kanter proposed a list of ten “hidden messages” that the non-innovating companies sent their employees every day, writing “Imagine something like this hanging on an executive’s wall, right next to the corporate philosophy”:

1. Regard any new idea from below with suspicion-because
it’s new, and because it’s from below.
2. Insist that people who need your approval to act first go
through several other levels of management to get their signatures.
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticize
each other’s proposals. (That saves you the job of deciding;
you just pick the survivor.)
4. Express your criticisms freely, and withhold your praise.
(That keeps people on their toes.) Let them know they can
be fired at any time.
5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage
people from letting you know when something in
their area isn’t working.
6. Control everything carefully. Make sure people count anything
that can be counted, frequently.
7. Make decisions to reorganize or change policies in secret,
and spring them on people unexpectedly. (That also keeps
people on their toes.)
8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified,
and make sure that it is not given out to managers freely.
(You don’t want data to fall into the wrong hands.)
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation
and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut
back, layoff, move people around, or otherwise implement
threatening decisions you have made. And get them to do it
quickly.
10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already
know everything important about this business.

The big news this week is that my department has moved to a new building on our campus. If you have read my book GROUP GENIUS, you know that I have quite a bit to say about building architecture and office design (for example, see my post “The building that threw up on itself”). What kinds of offices foster creativity and collaboration? They are offices that support flexible work arrangements and frequent spontaneous reconfigurations, of people, furniture, walls, and cubicles. In innovative organizations, you find a blend of solo work, work in pairs, and collaborative teams. But most of today’s offices are designed to support only one kind of work: solitary work, alone in an office (or a cubicle). In innovative organizations, people are always moving around, bumping unexpectedly into others, and stopping for a few minutes to chat. Offices that support these natural connections have chairs and tables in the hallways or near the stairways, to make such conversations easier.

Space for solitary work

But there’s a problem. In a typical organization, everyone wants a private office. A bigger office is even better. And once the architects have finished giving everyone what they want–a nice private office–there’s no room left over for anything else other than halls and stairways to take them from the front door to their office. And that’s exactly what’s happened in my new building. I love my own office, and I’m sure everyone else does, too.

Space for collaboration

But there are no spaces to foster collaboration–no nooks in the hallways, no reconfigurable furniture or walls. We have a lounge with the coffee machine and frig, which is nice; and another function room which is very nice (but I wonder if it will be locked and require administrative approval to use?). But these spaces do not support spontaneous conversation and collaboration.

I have often said that university bureaucracies don’t look anything like the most innovative organizations. And when you walk inside most any university office building, you’ll see this right away: when you look down a long corridor and see a row of office doors running down each side. The challenge is: How can we convince everyone–employees, managers, and architects–to change their expectations and see the benefits of a new office design paradigm?

(Note: both photos in this post were taken while I was standing in the same spot, at the head of our new office hallway.)

I’ve been cleaning out my file cabinets to get ready for an upcoming move to a new building.  Buried in a long-forgotten file folder, I found a 1999 “Innovation Survey” by Price Waterhouse Coopers.  Many readers of my blog already know that just about every consulting firm now publishes an annual innovation survey; the best known are Boston Consulting Group (published in connection with Business Week magazine) and Booz Allen Hamilton (published in their own magazine, Strategy+Business).  The amazing thing about the 1999 PWC report is that it is right on the money.  Remember my blog posting from last week, about Gary Hamel’s “Inventing the Future of Innovation” conference?  Just about every recommendation that we came up with was already in this 1999 report.  Here’s a sampling:

* The critical role of knowledge management in gathering, discussing, and disseminating new ideas from both inside and outside the firm

* Innovation can’t be limited to a separate group, like an R&D lab; it has to be everyone’s responsibility and be built into everyday ways of working

* Diverse teams generate better ideas

* The most critical element of an innovative culture is trust between people that will enable them to share ideas freely

* Survey respondents fall into two management styles: managed (planned, systemic) and open (radical, discontinous initiatives that have no obvious connection with past successes; balancing the consensual and the anarchic).  Of the top 20% of performers in their survey, 75% displayed the open style; of the top 5%, all displayed the open style.

If you’ve read my book GROUP GENIUS, you know that I wasn’t surprised by any of this.  But what is surprising is that this knowledge has been around for so long, for at least ten years, and the majority of companies still aren’t paying attention.  If we all get together in ten more years for another “future of management” conference, it would be pretty depressing if nothing in the corporate world has changed.

Expert consultants to the report included: Mark Brown and Dominic Swords of Henley Management College; Scott Isaksen, Brian Dorval, and Ken Lauer of the Creative Problem Solving Group at Buffalo; Gerard Puccio of the Center for Studies in Creativity; and Chris Dewberry of Birkbeck College.  The report originated in the U.K. and has a distinctly U.K. flavor (or “flavour”?) but the findings are valid in every region.

Today’s conference at Washington University, called the Innovation Exchange, brought together top scholars and business leaders to think collaboratively about fostering innovation.  It was hosted by our new Institute for Innovation and Growth.  Keynote speakers included:

Bill Peck (former Dean of Washington U. Medical School and founder of Innovate St. Louis)

Carliss Baldwin (Professor at Harvard Business School and an expert in the relations between design and the economy)

Christoph Loch (Professor of Corporate Innovation at INSEAD, possibly the best business school in Europe)

Jeff DeGraff (Dean of Innovation at the Competing Values Company and a professor at University of Michigan)

Key insights that emerged included:

* The need to transform business school education to teach for innovation

* The desire for managers and innovation champions to have a forum where they can exchange problems, issues, and solutions

* The need for managers and staff to be educated about how innovative companies work, and how they can make their own organizations more innovative

Watch this blog in the coming year, as this new Institute for Innovation begins to take shape.

Imagine you’re the CEO and your goal is to make your organization more innovative.  Where would you start?  No doubt, you would start with your people.  And the part of the organization responsible for your staff’s professional growth and development is human resources.  “Human resources” gets a bad rap; in the Dilbert comic strip, the evil Catbert symbolizes the senseless bureaucracy too often associated with the human resources department.  But thriving, innovative companies are learning organizations.  Learning organizations provide constant opportunities for everyone to reach their fullest creative potential.

I touched down in the human resources world last week, when I gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the eLearning Guild.  (Listen to a pre-conference audio interview.)  The members of the Guild are the people that design web-based learning applications for corporate training, certification, licensing, legal guidelines…we’ve all worked through at least one such on-line application.  Most of them are far from innovative–you’re presented with a bunch of information, then afterwards you’re tested with multiple choice, true-false items.  This is simple information delivery, and all the research shows that this sort of learning does not result in creative employees.

So, in my talk, I drew from the latest research in both the innovation process and in the learning sciences.  This research gives us a pretty good idea of how to design learning environments that foster creative learning, rather than simple memorization of facts.  The problem is that this research is just now starting to emerge from university research labs, and most people “down in the trenches” haven’t encountered it yet.

But instructional designers in HR departments can’t make the transformation to innovative learning all by themselves.  The transformation has to be initiated by senior management, and they have to push hard to create a culture of organizational learning, and of innovation.  Only with top management support can an HR department shift to designing innovative learning applications that do more than simply deliver information.

I was extremely impressed by the knowledge and talent of the professionals in attendance at this event.  They’re exploring some truly exciting and innovative technologies: immersive learning simulations, multi-player online games, even using cell phones to deliver on-demand instruction.  Keep your eye on this sector; you’re going to see dramatic changes in the next three to five years.

I’ve just read an interesting academic paper by Pamela J. Hinds at Stanford.  It’s an experimental study that seems to show that if your company asks you to protect proprietary information, you might end up being less creative.

She took 69 undergraduates and asked them to imagine they worked for a company and that their goal was to “generate novel and marketable ideas for consumer-oriented information appliances” (like a toaster with a computer screen on it).  Theiy were told they’d then share their ideas with a task force containing people from many companies.  The best ideas would get a $25 bonus payment.  Before starting the task, she gave each of them a packet with eleven pieces of information about information appliances.

Then, she split them into two groups.  Half of the students were told that of the eleven pieces of information, four of them were proprietary and could not be used in the final suggestion–because, after all, that would be shared with the task force and other companies would have people on the task force.  The other half of the students were told all the information was public and they were allowed to use all eleven pieces of information.

Of the proprietary students, the average number of ideas they generated was 10.18, and of the
public students, the average was 7.54.  That seems to suggest that working with proprietary information makes you have fewer ideas.

Prof. Hinds then had all of the ideas rated for novelty and marketability by a product design engineer, on a scale of 1 to 5.  The average creativity rating of the proprietary students’ ideas was 3.54, and for the public ideas, 3.47–not a significant difference.  Finally, she compared the single highest rated idea for each student; and it turned out that the public students’ single best idea was more creative than the proprietary students.

The results are not dramatic but they are suggestive.  Prof. Hinds concludes by discussing the reasons why this might be the case.  It could be that suppressing the proprietary information is mentally demanding, and so interferes with idea generation.  Or, it could be that students in the proprietary condition perceive the task to be more constraining, feel that they have less autonomy, and thus their motivation to create declines.  Prof. Hinds is inclined to the first explanation, but further research is needed.

Hinds, P. J.  2000. The hidden cost of keeping secrets: How protecting proprietary information can inhibit creativity.  Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii Int’l Conference on Systems Science.

Apple’s corporate image is one of the creative iconoclast; their motto, “Think Different.” Their products look great. Artsy people like graphic designers, photographers, and film directors choose Apples.

Does the ad campaign work? Does the average person-in-the-street think of Apple computers as being more creative? A recent study done at Duke University’s Fuqua school of business provides some evidence that it does. This research has been all over the newspapers and even on NPR, so you may have already heard the take-home message: research subjects were shown an image of either Apple’s corporate logo or IBM’s corporate logo, and immediately afterwards they were given a creativity test. The subjects who’d seen the Apple logo scored higher on the creativity test. Ready-made message for news reporters: Apple really does make people “think different”. I’m sure Apple’s PR department was high-fiving over this free publicity!

But the details of the study haven’t been reported at all, and when you look at the details, the message is more complex. First of all, the test used to measure “creativity” has some problems; it’s from a research article published back in 1958, and all it asks is “think of as many unusual uses as possible for a brick.” (It’s called the “unusual uses test”.) This is a measure of what creativity researchers call “divergent thinking” and it isn’t really what most of us mean when we talk about creativity. And in fact, no studies have been able to prove that a higher score on divergent thinking tests translates into real-world creative output. Second, the difference between seeing Apple or IBM was very small. The 219 subjects who saw an Apple logo, on average, wrote down 7.68 uses; the 122 who saw IBM wrote down 6.10. When independent judges rated the creativity of the answers, Apple answers got a rating of 8.44, IBM answers a rating of 7.98. These differences were statistically significant, but it’s not hard for small differences to reach statistical significance when you have so many subjects; it’s well-known in psychological research that a greater number of subjects raises the significance of the finding. And furthermore, when the researchers added a third experimental condition–no brand logo shown at all–the Apple subjects did not score significantly higher than these “no brand” subjects (they still scored higher than IBM subjects, though).

The researchers later did another experiment where they first measured how much each subject valued creativity–how much they wanted to be creative. Those who scored low on this measure, who didn’t really want to be creative, showed no differences on the unusual uses test with either Apple or IBM logos. But those who scored highly showed a difference, coming up with about 8 unusual uses for the brick in the Apple condition, but just barely over 5 in the IBM condition, and just barely over 5 in the no-brand condition. (And, the independent judges rated the Apple uses as being the most creative of all three conditions.)

One final interesting fact about this study: in the first experiment, the Apple and IBM logos were flashed on the screen for only about 13 milliseconds, so briefly that no one was consciously aware they had seen the logo. This was a subliminal effect. In the second experiment, the one that asked about your motivation to be creative, the subjects actually saw (and manipulated) images of generic-looking computers, with either an Apple or IBM logo prominently displayed on the computer’s monitor (or no computers at all, in the no brand condition).

You know how your car always seems to run better after you take it to the car wash? Of course, it runs exactly the same as before you washed it. In the same way, when you use a product that you associate with creativity, you should feel more creative (even though you’re probably not). However, discovering that exposure to corporate logos changed their score on a test is intriguing. I wouldn’t call the “unusual uses test” a measure of creativity; but the experiment makes you wonder, nonetheless. Should Apple feel proud about the results of this research? The headline would be very different if it read “Staring at Apple computers helps you think of strange ways to use a brick.”

I spent a few days last week in Oklahoma City, as a keynote speaker for an event sponsored by the Creative Oklahoma initiative. Believe it or not, but Oklahoma is working hard to become known as the “state of creativity” (and they’ve gotten a good start by securing the domain name www.stateofcreativity.com). Like many of my readers, I was at first skeptical; Oklahoma doesn’t typically come to mind in connection with the creative economy. But Oklahoma’s creativity initiative has the backing of top political and business leaders, a rare combination. I met the Governor as well as a substantial number of local business leaders. And both Democrats and Republicans were united behind the initiative.

For about five years now, Oklahoma’s initiative has been guided by Sir Ken Robinson, a leader in the field of creativity and education who has spent most of his life in the U.K. (thus accounting for his knighthood by the Queen) and, seven years ago, attracted to the U.S. by a top position at the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles. No doubt as a result of this expert advise, Oklahoma is doing everything right–the campaign is proceeding on multiple fronts, including education, culture, and business.

I was invited to talk about innovation in the schools of the future. Oklahoma schools have adopted the A+ schools model that originated in North Carolina. If we want a creative economy, then we absolutely have to start with our schools, because the creative economy depends on creative workers. I haven’t written much on this blog about my research on schools and creativity, but let me just say that most schools today do a very poor job of fostering creativity in students. When I see Oklahoma investing in its schools in this way, I begin to believe that it truly could become known as the “state of creativity.”

They’ll have to be in it for the long haul; regional transformations like this historically have taken between ten and twenty years. Another invited speaker was Pascal Cools, of the Flanders District of Creativity project. Flanders is the Flemish region of Belgium, and until a few years ago was thought of as an agrarian backwater. Now it’s a center of the global innovation economy. In the small Belgium town of Leuven, Pascal coordinates a global network of “districts of creativity” that include Qindao, China, Karnatka, India, Catalonia (”in” Spain although the Catalonians would deny that), and yes, Oklahoma–the only state in the U.S. to be a member in this international effort.

I wish Oklahoma great success in this transformative effort.

On Wednesday, the leaders of the world gathered in Davos, Switzerland for their annual schmoozefest known as the World Economic Forum (January 23-27). At no other annual event can you find country presidents and prime ministers mingling with CEOs of the largest multinational corporations, listening to talks by thought leaders from around the globe. The theme of this year’s event is “The Power of Collaborative Innovation”. Collaboration is, more and more, the driver of corporate success; but by choosing collaboration for this year’s WEF theme, Davos is acknowledging that collaboration is also the key to solving the most pressing global issues. In previous years, the Davos meeting received more attention for the anti-globalization protesters outside the gates, but this year’s theme doesn’t seem to have offended anyone.

Presentations include Matt Parker, of Nike, describing their Nike Plus gadget–a device that you put on your shoe and hook into your iPod, and also connect you to the Internet. The system allows runners to communicate, to come together and organize races for example. Reuters’ Tom Glocer described their company’s internal innovation program, where employees are encouraged to submit ideas in a quick one-page document.

In a typical Davos event, CNBC reporter Maria Bartiromo interviewed Bono, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell. They announced their support for the (RED) initiative (if you purchase a product that is “red,” the selling company makes a donation to fight AIDS in Africa). Soon after that, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown joined a powerhouse panel that included the CEOs of Cisco and Pepsi, to discuss why it makes business sense for corporations to establish social responsibility as a priority alongside profits.

A press release dated today was titled “Collaboration Key To Success As New Initiatives Are Launched In The Field Of Humanitarian Relief At Davos.” Members companies and the United Nations announced two initiatives to bring together the private sector and the humanitarian community, to harness their collective power collaboratively.

The theme of collaboration has five sub-themes. I was particularly intrigued by the first: “Competing while collaborating.” This is a central topic of Chapters 9 and 10 of my new book Group Genius. It sounds counterintuitive; but, over and over, the most innovative companies are the ones that figure out how to build collaborative webs with partners, customers, and even with their competitors. And because my book’s subtitle is “The Creative Power of Collaboration,” you know I’m excited to see the importance of collaboration recognized by such a high-profile event.

Happy New Year!

Group Genius has been chosen as the 2008 Direction for the Creative Leadership Forum, a group of 3000 senior executives based throughout Asia Pacific and Australia.  Check it out at http://www.thecreativeleadershipforum.com/ They have a partnership with the innovation-focused magazine Fast Thinking, with a subscribed database of 50,000 globally.  You can learn more about Fast Thinking at http://www.fastthinking.com.au

On December 20th, I did a live one-hour interview with Deb Hobson, host of KOPN’s show “A Chautauqua”.  Our conversation ranged widely, from stories in my book, to my blog postings here and on the Huffington Post.  You can listen to it here:

http://www.kopn.org/archive