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HMM In Brief Audio

Innovation and Creativity

Harvard ManageMentor In Brief on Innovation and Creativity

"Innovate or die." You hear this mantra in boardrooms from Bonn to Beijing, New York to New Delhi. The corporate landscape
is littered with the tombstones of once-successful companies that stopped innovating. In a global economy, there is no
resting on laurels. Move forward and innovate, or other hungrier companies will move into your space.

Where do innovative solutions come from? The answer is teams. Teams are the idea incubators of 21st-century business.
Teams all over the world are at this moment identifying small improvements in how their companies do business that, at
scale, will make significant differences. And somewhere there are a few teams preparing to make visionary leaps forward that
will revolutionize industries.

It is a myth that only the young, smart, and flamboyant are creative. In reality, most innovation comes from collaboration,
which is a process, not a talent or personality trait.

And that is where you, the manger, come in. Poorly managed teams fail in a myriad of ways. Many trot forth the same tired
approaches. Others devolve into chaos as team members clash. Some generate fabulous ideas but never bring them to
fruition. What separates teams such as these from teams that keep their companies in business? Most likely, good
management.

In practice, stimulating creativity in a team requires a collaborative approach that maximizes everyone's distinctive gifts,
experience, and expertise. Teams often have a goal of solving a specific problem or fulfilling a specific need, but they must be
careful to avoid tunnel vision. If all they see in front of them is their assigned goal, they may lean on the opinions of experts
and fail to bring the fresh perspective of what is called "beginner's mind." Reaching consensus quickly can doom a team to
failure. Creativity comes from casting wide for new ideas, then filtering the catch to identify those ideas that are genuinely
novel and worth pursuing.

Innovation is the end result of this creative process. There are five phases involved in collaborating to innovate:

• First, add intellectual diversity to the team

• Second, identify an opportunity for innovation
• Third, generate different approaches
• Fourth, consider the options, and
• Fifth, converge on a solution

The first phase in collaborating to innovate is to add intellectual diversity to the team. You may not have complete
control over the team's makeup, but it is still your responsibility to examine the team's composition. Ask yourself, "Does this
team have the necessary intellectual diversity to handle this challenge?"

If your answer is "yes," that means the team has people with different areas of expertise and disciplines. It is obvious why
you need experts who know a lot about the problem or need you are addressing. But you also need people with experience in
other areas. A case in point: Medical researchers now use the blue blood of horseshoe crabs to test for bacterial diseases.
How did they even think to look at horseshoe crabs for that purpose? They figured out an innovative solution to a problem by
applying expertise from the unrelated discipline of marine biology.

If your answer to the question of intellectual diversity is "yes", that also means that the team members have different
thinking styles. A thinking style is the way a person looks at and interacts with the world. For example, some people are
comfortable doing blue-sky thinking, while others prefer to be grounded in hard data and concrete facts.

Consider this example: Imagine a team with four women and five men. Two members are over the age of 50 and one is
under 25. Four different ethnic backgrounds are represented. Is this team likely to be intellectually diverse? The answer is —
not necessarily! You have age, gender, and ethnic diversity on this team, but those are not the same as intellectual diversity.
None of these categories is useful in predicting whether a person is a blue-sky thinker. You have to get to know the team at a
deeper level than labels to answer the question, "Is the team intellectually diverse?"

When different thinking styles rub up against each other, creative sparks fly. You want conflict — but conflict in ideas and
approaches, not conflict between people. You want people who will challenge accepted ways of doing things. You also want
people who can envision solutions that do not currently exist — and others who know the facts well enough to poke holes in
those visions.

If you decide that your team is not intellectually diverse, you have a few options. If you can add members to your team, find
people whose thinking styles complement those of existing members. Or bring in outside experts to lead brainstorming
sessions and provide advice — and invite people from other functional groups. You may want to make a business case to your
superiors that the project's success depends on changes in the team composition.

Once you've added intellectual diversity to your team, the second phase in collaborating to innovate is to identify an
opportunity for innovation. Most successful innovation is the result of a conscious search rather than a blinding flash of
insight. Look for opportunities inside and outside your company. For example, how might a recent merger be leveraged to

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create a new opportunity? Or, what industry changes, new technologies, demographic shifts, or market demands might open
up opportunities for innovation?

Next, you need to move from identifying opportunities to the third phase: generating different approaches to the
opportunity you have selected. This is the time for what is called "divergent thinking," which consists of:

• Seeing connections among facts or events that others have missed

• Asking questions that haven't been asked before
• And asking questions from different perspectives

The goal of divergent thinking is to generate a wide variety of options. Experts recognize that this is an extremely hard task.
Speed is important; and time is certainly money. And yet, driving too hard toward a goal can mean your team loses its
peripheral vision. As Richard Pascale, author and corporate adviser, warns, the periphery is "inevitably where the great jewels
of insight are."

Once you have generated a variety of possible approaches, you are ready to carefully consider the different options, the
fourth phase. Your team begins to evaluate all the ideas that were generated to determine which ones are novel and worth
pursuing.

Finally, in the fifth phase, the team must converge on a single innovative approach or idea. This is when the team gets
together behind one approach and lays out the steps required to achieve the solution.

Whether a team successfully navigates these five phases of the creative process and produces an innovative solution depends
on you. Let's look at your role as manager and six quick tips for enhancing a team's creativity:

• One, set up a stimulating physical workspace to encourage conversations and easy camaraderie. Can you find
some comfortable chairs or fun toys to add to the team space?
• Two, build team spirit through social events, recognition of achievement, and novel activities, such as contests for
coming up with a clever project codename.
• Three, set clear rules regarding how team members interact. Personal respect, active listening, and a commitment
to the team's goals are vital.

• Four, establish a supportive environment in which team members feel free to experiment and are allowed to learn
from failure. At the same time, set limits on experimentation with clear expectations regarding schedule and
milestones.
• Five, create a trusting climate that allows people to discuss difficult issues. Make it clear that you want any issues
to be surfaced, even if the subject may seem taboo.
• And six, be a role model. Show respect for members who disagree with you. Remember that you are also a team
member. Join in the hard work of selecting a challenge, developing options, and converging on a solution.

For a more in-depth look at learning how to manage for creativity, see the Harvard ManageMentor topic
Innovation and Creativity.

© 2007 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved.

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