Embedding Innovation Culture

We believe:

Human beings are innately designed to innovate.

Ideas, creativity, and the capacity to imagine new possibilities are built into our DNA. They're how our species has survived and advanced for millennia. However, these capacities get suppressed in rigid systems of school, work, and business. By the time most people reach senior roles, they've been trained out of their own creativity and focused on stability and risk minimisation.

Embedding innovation culture is about setting up processes, practices, performance incentives, and removing the barriers that prevent people from doing what they were designed to do in the first place - solve complex overlapping problems and create meaning from chaos. 

As Clayton Christensen demonstrated in The Innovator's Dilemma, the very management practices that make companies successful can also create structural barriers to disruptive innovation as the company grows. i.e. The processes that optimised today's business are the same processes that kill tomorrow's.

Companies that don't actively counterbalance this tendency get out-innovated by smaller, hungrier challengers - usually before they've noticed it's happening.

In short, innovation is the lifeblood of business. And implementing it into your culture is how you survive and grow.

How we work.

Our approach draws on the established thinking of:

• Roger Martin: integrative thinking, strategic choice-making)
• Tim Brown: Design thinking as a business discipline and instilling creative confidence
• Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen:  (the five discovery skills of innovative leaders), and the broader body of research on how organisations actually become, and stay, innovative.

There are five 'pillars' within an organisation where innovation culture is established: leadership behaviour, the working environment, process and rhythm, psychological safety and reward, and external orientation. 

We work with what your organisation already has in place, and we identify where the potential barriers/opportunities are.

Then we help your team make the conscious choices that shift the culture to thrive on innovation.

Where to start.

Whether you're an individual leader looking to think differently, a team that wants to develop together, or an organisation ready to embed innovation across the business, we have an entry point that fits.