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Teaching – One Pillar of Healthy Innovation

I think there are three pillars to healthy innovation within a company or university.

  1. Teaching
  2. Collaboration
  3. Organizational Health

Leave-Me-Alone

In this post I’d like to discuss teaching, I’ll touch on the others in later posts.

Have you ever encountered scientists or engineers who refuse to change their innovation habits?  They seem to know everything, they ridicule most efforts at managing innovation and are almost impossible to influence.

I’ve acted this way myself, scoffing at attempts to manage innovation, telling managers and the like to just leave me alone, I’ll figure it out and send you a report. There is value in just leaving a good innovator alone but that is just one tool of many in innovation management.

The accumulation of knowledge tends to increase ego, if you’ve spent a lot of time around certain University professors it is not hard to see this:

1 Corinthians 8:1 … knowledge puffs up …

Valuable R&D professionals discover, accumulate and manage knowledge very efficiently.

We need to lead our innovative teams in a way that will both cause our most innovative R&D pros to collaborate together and in a way that does not trigger anger and resistance.

I am convinced that there is a win-win if we can encourage our scientists to teach.  If we can get our R&D professionals to teach one another, teach leadership, and document learning’s with a motive of teaching this will trigger collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and a feeling of being engaged, (which will speed up innovation long-term).  The great thing about teaching is that it appeals to intellectual ego that can cause us to be uncooperative at times.

What are  other tips at getting R&D professionals to collaborate?

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Failure & Intrapreneurship

Working in R&D I realized that effectively we are all intrapreneurs.   We’re constantly trying to develop new businesses for the corporation.

Intrapreneur is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as:  

“A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation”

One thing that entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs share is the goal of profitability.  We both are creating businesses, we are both looking for ways to create value and systematize the creation of that value.

The added complexity of contending with entrenched culture, entrenched bureaucracy and toxic organizations can make the intrepreneurs’ job more difficult.

On the other hand the added restraint of available funds make the entrepreneurs’ job more stressful and more risky.

One thing however that both the entrepreneur and intrapreneur must struggle with is …FAILURE.

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The failure rate of my projects in R&D over the past 17 years is much greater than 50%.  Projects fail for a variety of reasons sometimes due to technical challenges, other times due to external market conditions, other times due to poor leadership or employee performance.

Entrepreneurs have the luxury of controlling their culture around the topic of failure because the entrepreneur can just adopt a positive attitude about failure, the entrepeneur usually works alone or with a very small team of like-minded leaders.

“I never fail, I just learn how things don’t work.” – unknown

In other words an entrepreneur can make up his/her own mind that failure is just part of the process, it is just a mechanism of learning.

The intrapreneur must contend with organizational health, a large team of people many more powerful and influential than himself, he must deal with culture, if the culture in ones R&D organization does not handle failure this can spell trouble for the intrapreneur.

Failed projects can result in finger-pointing, in blame politics, which can spell real career trouble.  One thing that R&D organizations should do is to constantly frame the story, the attitudes of everyone around failure. 

I have been part of organizations that lambasted the members of a failed project, the courageous leader was “torn to shreds”  so to speak, blamed for the wasting of millions and it was a career altering delay.

This is not healthy, R&D leaders can learn from the attitudes of entrepreneurs and lead accordingly.  Blame and perfection are culture destroyers in the innovation organization.

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” ~ Sven Goram Erikson

A healthy perspective about failure is easiest way to rapidly improve R&D culture, at the highest levels corporations need to stop the blame game and permit failure, so we can relax and create system for capturing and spreading learnings and developing R&D professionals to develop business’ more effectively and more rapidly.

How does your organization handle failure?

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Healthy R&D Organizations Major on Teaching

I’ve noticed that being a healthy means different things to different types of organizations.

  • To a small business, health means cash flow, strong teams and hard work.
  • To our new-born, health means a lot of mom’s milk and clean diapers.
  • To a family, health means a strong marriage, good nutrition and an active lifestyle.
  • To a church, health means that Jesus Christ at the center and supreme of all that happens.
  • For an R&D organization, one that is innovating and developing new products. I think health to a great degree means mostly open teaching.  Researchers teaching one another, researchers teaching their management and researchers teaching the manufacturing and business leaders exactly how to produce novel and new products. Researchers are essentially professional learners and if they don’t learn to teach their usefulness is limited. Patents if written well are designed to teach, in exchange for this teaching the government gives the patent owner a limited-time monopoly on the invention.

When turf wars, politics, secretiveness and credit stealing is the norm the health of the R&D organization is poor and its usefulness to a company diminishes quickly.

Being intelligent and hiring smart people is only so important, intelligence is undermined and made of little effect if the culture is toxic. To hear a lot more on this from Patrick Lencioni on this click here.

Leaders of innovative R&D organizations can encourage health by being a self-less teacher and by encouraging teams to teach. To teach continuously and with generous passion.  And remember to give credit when they do so.

What else does healthy look like in R&D organizations?

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