141. An Invitation for Innovation: Why Creativity Is Found, Not Forced
May 7, 2024
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Professor Linda Hill from Harvard Business School discusses how innovation is driven by collaboration rather than individual ideas. She emphasizes the importance of diverse expertise and perspectives coming together. The podcast explores fostering innovation through collaboration, conflict, and effective communication, highlighting the role of storytelling and curiosity in driving success.
Innovation thrives when diverse individuals collaborate to co-create the future collectively, emphasizing experimentation and quick learning.
Cultivating a culture of innovation requires fostering collaboration, experimentation, and effective communication, aligning values with shared purpose and guiding interactions with clear rules of engagement.
Deep dives
Leading Innovation vs. Leading Change
Leading innovation involves creating an environment where diverse individuals collaborate to co-create the future collectively. Unlike traditional leadership, innovators focus on fostering collaboration, experimentation, and quick learning to solve problems. This approach emphasizes building a culture that values shared purpose, explicit values, and clear rules of engagement, emphasizing the importance of effective communication for innovation.
Cultivating a Culture of Innovation
Cultivating a culture of innovation necessitates collaboration, experimentation, and leveraging diverse talents and perspectives. To foster innovation, organizations need shared values aligned with collaboration and learning. The culture should promote a sense of belonging and purpose, establish explicit values, and define rules of engagement to guide interactions and problem-solving. Communication plays a pivotal role in reinforcing these cultural aspects.
Conflict and Innovation
Conflict is essential for innovation as it enables diverse perspectives to be leveraged for creative solutions. Managing the tension between structure and improvisation is crucial for innovation. Creative abrasion amplifies differences, leading to innovative solutions, while creative agility emphasizes experimentation and learning. Creative resolution guides decision-making processes, ensuring inclusivity and effective communication among diverse contributors.
So you want to lead your team toward innovation. Does that require that you know where you’re going? Not according to Linda Hill.
Hill is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School whose research focuses on leadership and how organizations achieve innovation. When it comes to generating breakthrough ideas, Hill says it’s less about a creative vision and more about stepping into the unknown. “Innovation [is] not about an individual coming up with a new idea,” she says. “Instead, innovation is the result of the collaboration of people with diverse expertise and diverse perspectives coming together, being able to collaborate, being able to experiment together and learn.”
In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Hill and host Matt Abrahams discuss how leaders can foster cultures and environments where innovation thrives — where teams use communication and collaboration to “co-create the future.”