¿Por qué innovan los que innovan?
Pues hay muchas explicaciones y teorías pero yo me quedo con los ejemplos y teorías de Charles Leadbeater en el borrador de su libro We Think:why mass creativity is the next big thing.
El libro es ya, para mi, una lectura imprescindible para todos los interesados en cambiar cómo funcionan las organizaciones, las ciudades y los paises a la hora de innovar. Algunas perlas:
Sobre el I+D clásico y la verdadera innovación…
The truth is that most traditional commercial organisations do not want their consumers to become contributors. They quite like them passive and so dependent.They do not want their staff self-organising, they want them to be aligned to the corporate plan.They do not like it when innovation comes from all over.They want ideas to emerge in orderly fashion from their R & D labs so they can control them. Industrial era organisations were designed for a heavy, slow world.They do not want to face competitors designed for an era when ideas flit about like pollen carried by swarms of bees. Leaders quite like their self-image as lonely, harsh, authoritative figures, cut off from the organisations they drive into corporate battle.The idea that you might be able to lead more effectively in a far more open, transparent and conversational way ruins all the fun.
La metodología…
A group, possibly quite a small one, usually creates a kernel that invites further contributions: it’s a base camp, not the peak.The project must be regarded as exciting, intriguing and challenging by a critical mass of engaged users with the know-how needed to contribute to it. It must be very easy for disaggregated contributions to be made, because it very easy to take part. Tools should be widely distributed, experimentation cheap and feedback very fast.That enables a constant process of trialling, testing and refinement.The product should benefit from extensive peer review, to correct errors and verify good ideas. Contributors should get a tangible sense of satisfaction from their involvement.No one should have to wait for a long time to find out whether their idea has been approved (a feature of life in big organisations.) Tasks should be broken down into modules around which small, close-knit teams can form.That allows a huge diversity of experiments to run in parallel.There should be clear rules for how the modules are brought back together and the good ideas are separated from the bad. Ownership of the project has to have a strong public
component, otherwise it is difficult to see why sharing would make sense.
Los incentivos de las grandes organizaciones tradicionales para…no innovar:
Mainstream companies operating in mainstream markets often have very powerful incentives not to innovate.The way to get promoted in a large company is to go to the board with a proposal for an incremental improvement, to an existing product, aimed at existing consumers that the company knows well, and which it can sell to through familiar channels and which offers sure-fire returns.
¿Por qué Google sí innova?
This call for more open and participative forms of work may all sound utopian and I might have been inclined to agree until I met Chris Sacca over dinner in late 2005. Sacca is a principal at Google, the information search company and one of the first handful of employees. I asked him how Google managed to come up with its flow of ideas.His reply went something like this. Every Friday everyone in Google gathers for an all company meeting, 7,000 people, face-to-face or connected by video.Anyone can ask the senior management any question about the
company’s policy, strategy or performance. People who ask more direct and difficult questions tend to get a round of applause. Every Friday, every person working in one of Sacca’s teams files him five bullets explaining what he or she has achieved that week and five more on what they plan to achieve in the week to come.That is the only
reporting system.He does some work making sure everyone is on track but most of the time it is up to people to sort out what they are doing, adjust to one another without calling in a manager: the beach ethic at work.Anyone in the company can search through the bullets submitted by anyone else, including those from the chief executive.
Anyone in Google can launch a development project to create a new service, so long as they post the details on a central site, so everyone else can see what is going on.They can continue with their project until they want to recruit more than two people or start to use some significant server capacity.Once they have reached that stage they have to take the idea to a company council – a bit like a committee in an open source community – which will make a decision about whether it should go ahead. If it does get the go ahead then the project gets given very fewresources to begin with. Sacca explained :“You have to keep resources tight. If they can only recruit one extra person to the project, you know they are going to go out and get the best person they can find.”
Innovation is conversation: ideas have many authors:
New ideas increasingly will emerge from the interaction between users and producers, amateurs and professionals, rather than coming down a pipeline from the boffins and professionals, to the waiting, open mouthed consumers.This more interactive and participative approach to innovation will challenge many deeply held assumptions about what creativity is,where is comes from, how it should be rewarded and organised.
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