PAST EVENTS:
       
Third Annual Innovation Summit
Octobber 2009 Köln, Germany

Designing Your Organization’s Innovation Scorecard

What do leaders need to do to leverage the creativity of their employees    and build a more sustainable innovative organization?  From our research and our work with companies we have identified several key drivers.  They include: 

• A versatile leadership style that is both supportive and decisive, strategic and tactical.  Leaders need to balance the seemingly contradictory demands of being collaborative and holding others accountable, thinking big picture into the future, but also paying attention to critical operational details in the present.  In addition, senior leaders of an organization — no matter how large or small — must be open to being challenged, remain curious and willing to experiment, and truly value and listen to others.  Only then will employees ask questions and come up with new ideas and solutions. This type of flexible and open leadership style, however, is not easy for leaders to adopt, especially if they have to fight, in one scholar's words, "the very human tendency to cling to [different] formulas that worked well in the past."
• Flexible processes that promote communication, teamwork, creative idea generation and decision making, as well as provide a focus on execution.
• Financial and operational metrics that drive accountability and progress.
• A culture that promotes innovation through a well-communicated vision, mission and strategy; strong values of teamwork, collaboration, and empowerment; supportive systems; and a laser focus on the customer and the external world.

To be truly successful, an organization needs to embed all of the above innovative practices and metrics into the fabric of the organization and align them with the organization's culture.

In addition, we have found that too often recommendations for actions to take to build a more innovative organization are made with the assumption that all leaders and all organizations are the same. These recommendations rarely address the individual needs of organizations and the personal preferences of leaders, and instead provide standard solutions that fail to address the particular organization’s challenges and context.

Finally, our research has led us to the conclusion that the practices promoting creativity in employees and innovation in an organization are the enduring principles of good management. These principles drive innovation, but they have also been shown to promote high employee satisfaction, morale and thus well satisfied, loyal customers and long-term organizational success.