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Foster a culture of collaborative innovation

Feb 21, 2012, 06.45AM IST

By P Gopalakrishnan

While individual accomplishment has long been the gold standard for invention, a new era of "collaborative innovation" is upon us.

Collaborative innovation has become a necessity. The problems in our society are becoming too complex to be solved by a single R&D lab, company or industry - much less by a single person. Indeed, more new data is being created every two days than the world created from the beginning of time to 2003.

Solving big problems - from creating "smart grids" that cut energy costs, to analytics technology that helps local police departments detect patterns in crime - requires a way of working that taps into the collective intelligence of the team. Such collaborative innovation is central to how we tackle complex challenges, and how the private and public sectors can address the needs of societies around the world.

In such an environment, how does an organisation foster and maintain a culture of innovation? There are several key ingredients to this. The first is the ability to attract and nurture the right talent in the organisation, especially across multiple domains.

A study by the IBM Institute of Business Value found that most CEOs consider creative thinking - and the skills for creative leadership - as the "new differentiator" that helps organisations disrupt the status quo and break through organisational paralysis.

Creativity needs to be recognised and rewarded in the organisation. Collective innovation calls for a new style of leadership that fosters an environment where ideas can flourish. For example:

Leaders need to handle large doses of ambiguity and understand how to manage risk. They must enable their teams to experiment and tinker - and even fail. That was the case with the IBM team that created Watson, the computer that bested reigning champions on the TV game show, 'Jeopardy!' (and is now being applied to industries like healthcare and retail).

As Watson's lead scientist David Ferrucci says, not only was the technical challenge formidable, but also the success of the project was far from a "sure thing". In the end, "the team became the hero of the project, not any individual scientist or algorithm," according to Ferrucci.

It is important to embrace diversity of thought and expertise. For example, we are seeing cities that spearhead projects that involve multiple stakeholders with differing points of view, from mayors and city planners to local universities, business partners and advocacy groups.

It is important to be able to tap into experts from inside and outside your immediate sphere, from mentors and citizens, to academic experts and business partners, so you can understand the task at hand and exceed expectations. Today, analytics technology is able to comb through social media inside an organisation and outside to find experts in particular domains.

Collaborative innovation requires the ability to balance creative disruption with operational intensity. This takes discipline and a dose of interdisciplinary expertise. A software developer working on a financial solution will benefit from both technical knowledge and domain knowledge of the banking industry in order to provide valuable insight to the client.

Finally, nothing is more important than the ability to address the right problems with creative ideas. Organisations and society will value certain innovations more than others, depending on many factors, including what problem is being solved, the cost of implementing the idea, how easy it is to understand the value, and the ability to disrupt the status quo.

The last point is underscored by many examples, including the often-quoted case of the QWERTY keyboard, which has not been supplanted in over a 100 years. Now, if only someone could design a keyboard that can be operated faster by just two thumbs, I am sure today's SMS generation will lap it up!

P Gopalakrishnan is VP, IBM India Software Lab