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Driving Innovation by Creating Culture

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This entire year I’ve been talking about topics that most HR people don’t talk about.  Innovation and collaboration are often thought of as the domain of the business side.  It’s really the guys in production or R&D to figure out how to innovate, or so we thing.  We’re dead wrong.  I finally found a whitepaper that creates the linkages between what HR can do about innovation and producing the results for the business.

In ISR’s case study for innovation, they outline a series of drivers for creating a culture that bolsters innovation:

When examining results from its analyses, ISR concluded that four issues stand out as particularly important for this company to improve in order to support innovation more effectively – leadership, collaboration and teamwork, rewarding innovation, and bias for action. In the first analysis, ISR found that, of the cultural dimensions supporting innovation, these four issues were among those rated least favorably by company employees when compared with respondents in high-performing organizations. Therefore, there is room to improve in each of these areas.  ((ISR, 2005.  “Building Culture of Innovation.”  Retrieved from ISRinsight.com.))

It’s interesting to me which were ISR’s 4 major drivers.  Collaboration and teamwork is certainly not a surprise, but I’m a bit shocked that “support for risk taking” and “stimulating environment” were not higher on the list.  Generally I would have thought that a stimulating environment (not on the list) and “collaboration and teamwork” (on the list) would have been tightly correlated.  Similarly, a “bias for action” and “support for risk taking” were also not directly correlated.  It’s interesting when you see an organization that can actually measure these drivers within the workforce and put the numbers to good use.  While HR is not usually deemed as a key stakeholder for driving innovation, we are up there for building a corporate culture.  Linking these two may be HR’s best route to impacting the bottom line.

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6 responses to “Driving Innovation by Creating Culture”

  1. add in some companies that HR has the power to create it. The power to create or enhance. Yes! The power to control. No! HR contribution is in creating a culture that drives collaboration and innovation. Don’t take my word for it. Read this greatpostfrom …. SystematicHR

  2. Absolutely. I thinkSystematicHR’s got some good posts on this.

  3. Wally Bock Avatar

    I’m always skeptical of studies like this because some of the most important stuff the interpretation of the people doing the study. For example, how do you measure innovation, so that you can compare it in different organizations? Or why do we use an opinion survey to gauge culture instead of observations of behavior.

    That said, I’ll share a completely unscientific observation. When I’ve been inside companies that I thought were very innovative (turning ideas into changes in products and procedures that result in improved results) workers don’t need “support for risk taking” because they don’t feel that they’re taking risks. In other words, actions that might be risky in some organizations simply aren’t risky in innovation-rich cultures. They see trials (bias for action) as experiments and not as risks.

  4. […] encourages experimentation and removes obstacles for innovative action."Absolutely. I think SystematicHR's got some good posts on this.But my build on this is that HR is more likely to help the rest of […]

  5. […] encourages experimentation and removes obstacles for innovative action."Absolutely. I think SystematicHR's got some good posts on this.But my build on this is that HR is more likely to help the rest of […]