Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work : The New Yorker.

Innovation is the hot topic in many arenas: politics, economics, business and not the least, our own cultural field.

Financial Times writer Philip Delves Broughton (former and now part-time journalist, fiction writer and somewhat regretful Harvard MBA) reviews Michael Raynor’s The Innovator’s Manifesto.

The author notes leading thinking on innovation has cleaved (emphasis mine):

On one side are those who embrace the ideas of collaborative consumption and fast failure, who argue that innovators need to experiment with their potential consumers until they find a product or service that succeeds. These are the doers, the tinkerers who see innovation as a kind of performance art, to be done in full public view and modified according to the cheers and jeers of the crowd. On the other side are the strategists, those who still believe in thinking through an innovation before leaping in. Michael Raynor, a management consultant and protégé of Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor, is one of the most articulate and interesting of the strategists.

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Raynor writes convincingly that the current enthusiasm for “fast failure” and corporate “cultures of learning” is unrealistic. Corporate pathologies, such as “long memories, the jockeying for position, decision making by consensus”, he writes, lead to “risk aversion and incrementalism”, which make such innovation processes unworkable.

It is much more realistic for companies to strategise their way to innovation by focusing on areas where they might have a disruptive effect and designing processes and teams to exploit them. This requires a high degree of self-awareness and self-criticism.

Books: disruptive influence – FT.com.

The irony is that as a society, we’re constantly talking about how much we value creativity. And yet, the study implies that our minds are biased against it because of the very nature of its novelty. Going forward, perhaps it’s not that we need to get better at producing creative ideas, but at learning how to accept them.

Freakonomics » Why We Desire But Reject Creative Ideas

The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas. (original study)

At the risk of piling on the beatification bandwagon, an interesting post from the good folks at Harvard Business Review. The author argues that Jobs solved (Clayton Christensen’s) Innovator’s Dilemma upon returning from the wilderness, citing the radical changes he made at Apple. You know the ending: the case of Jobs and Apple is an excellent illustration of the difficulty, rarity and reward of “solving the dilemma.” I was equally struck, however, by some of the language employed.

He notes (emphasis mine):

Apple talks a lot about its great people. But make no mistake — they are there only in service of the mission…It didn’t matter how great you were, if you couldn’t deliver to that mission — you were out. Profit was viewed as necessary, but not sufficient, to justify everything Apple did.

Apple may arguably be an outlier amongst commercial firms in this respect, but I found the treatment of both mission and profit (substitute “sustainability” if you like) interesting in context of deeply embedded assumptions held by many in our field about the “for profit” world. (And vice versa, to be sure)

What do you think? Is Apple a mission-driven organization? Does this enable them to achieve (and/or get away with) things others can’t? Does this affect how Apple is viewed as a corporate citizen? See here for halo view and here for questioning, slightly less breathless view. Ironically, Christensen himself notoriously failed to recognize Apple as a disruptive innovator, asserting the iPhone would only be a sustaining innovation.

Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator’s Dilemma – James Allworth – Harvard Business Review.

Getting a deep understanding of one’s own fundraising approach and history, learning from peers, tallying the likely costs of change and weighing them against expected benefits—are three critical steps on the road to a funding model. And when the time comes to pilot and implement the one or two most promising funding models, a well-developed plan is essential.

And they remind why a critical but oft-overlooked aspect of strategy is knowing what to say ‘no’ to:

Moving forward with more than two [models] carries a high risk of overtaxing management and development staff. Then why not just settle on a single funding model right now?
The issue is uncertainty. At this stage, it may still be difficult for a nonprofit to know which model will work best, and there could be benefits in trying out the two most promising options to see which has the best prospects.

The authors offer two disclaimers in the form of size and a necessary precondition: organizations must be ‘free of immediate financial distress and [able to] focus on developing a long-term funding strategy’ as well as over $3 million in annual revenue. Below this level, the more ‘idiosyncratic’ approaches that predominate are likely to be as productive, therefore not justifying the significant investment inherent in their process.

Finding Your Funding Model (SSIR article)

Finding Your Funding Model: A Practical Approach to Nonprofit Sustainability (Bridgespan website with tool)

Five habits of mind…characterise disruptive innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Innovators excel at connecting seemingly unconnected things…companies that have the highest “innovation premiums”…display the same five habits of mind as individual innovators.

The Economist‘s writer (as always, sans byline) argues:

For all their insistence that innovation can be learned, Mr Christensen and co. produce a lot of evidence that the disruptive sort requires genius.

What do you think? Can innovation be learned? Does it flow from the individual to the organization? Does it require staggering genius?

If nothing else, you will learn how IKEA decided to flat-pack furniture.

Schumpeter: Think different | The Economist.

• Corporate philanthropy is highest in corporations with new CEOs, and decreases with the length of CEO tenure.
• The greater the proportion of female senior managers in a company, the greater the corporate philanthropic contributions will be.
• Companies with larger boards tend to have higher philanthropic contributions.

What impact might this have as you seek partners for your work?

Who Is Governing Whom? Senior Managers, Governance and the Structure of Generosity in Large U.S. Firms — HBS Working Knowledge.

A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Making Complex Decisions – Harvard Business Review

Of greatest interest are ‘create constraints’ paragraph ending article (natch) and sidebar on technology with Ray Kurzweil. Imposing artificial constraints (not unrelated to scenario planning) can be an especially powerful tool given the nature of change many of us extrapolate into the future is incremental and overly biased towards recent experience. This tendency can leave us woefully unprepared for step changes in the macro environment (2008) and technology (impact of Twitter, Facebook on marketing).

Sparking creativity in teams: An executive’s guide – McKinsey Quarterly.

…businesses and nonprofits are fundamentally single-purpose entities. Although the law allows them to stretch toward each other, a complete synthesis is not possible, and the further each model is stretched, the more legally uncertain the venture becomes…What makes the contract hybrid different is the degree to which the goals, objectives, and strategies of the nonprofit and the business are coordinated to serve mutual interests…they are tied together in a way that allows the whole structure to leverage the strengths of each organization.

A New Type of Hybrid.