Management's role should be to nudge employees into a supportive culture where innovation can thrive
Innovation is typically done by knowledge workers who are hired to perform assigned tasks, with the hope that they will exchange information and come up with new ideas.
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Any successful company must innovate to continue to grow, and a key concern for managers is how to foster an innovative mindset throughout the organization.
But innovation isn’t like a regular task that can be delegated: It requires voluntary creativity and time to flourish. It very much depends on the people who make up a company, and how they relate to one another. It depends on how management removes obstacles and what the company culture is like.
IESE’s Christoph Loch, with Konstantinos Ladas and Stylianos Kavadias of Cambridge Judge Business School, has created a model to characterize innovation culture and its effects on the organization.
“There’s a famous quip attributed to Peter Drucker,” says Loch, “that says ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ It means that company culture is a force of its own, maybe out of management’s control to direct. Yet there’s another view that culture is a set of habits designed by management to optimize performance. Where the two ideas overlap is in the understanding that organizational culture does influence performance. It allows innovation to grow, but it can’t be micromanaged.”
[This article has been reproduced with permission from IESE Business School. www.iese.edu/ Views expressed are personal.]