The authors of a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, studied innovative groups and their leaders over the past decade to see how the innovation process works in repeatedly successful organizations. And what they learned was good news for big organizations.
The innovation myth of the solitary genius.
Their studies indicated that innovation doesn’t happen solely by hiring a few creative people and executing their brilliant ideas.
“Contrary to the popular myth that it’s the work of solitary genius, organizational innovation is most often the work of many hands – [it’s] a ‘team sport’…” — Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback
The authors argue that the real goal is creating what they call “singular collective genius” — that is, a gestalt innovation made from the various, individual pieces of genius contributed by members of a group.
It’s not enough to just hire creative people.
Making innovation a repeatable occurrence in a company requires not just hiring creative people, but getting them to work together productively.
No one single person magically “makes innovation happen” — it’s created by bringing together individual “slices of genius” from multiple employees so that the innovation – a new product, process, or strategy — becomes obvious and easy to identify.
The authors call this “collective genius” and the most important aspect of this idea is the “collective” part.
The advantage big organizations have in innovation.
While many people think big businesses are incapable of innovation, big businesses do have a huge potential advantage over smaller ones — big businesses are, by definition, big. And that means they have more brains to throw at a problem.
Of course, what many big businesses don’t have is an effective way to bring all those brains together. And that’s why, if you’re a large organization that wants increased innovation, you should consider deploying tibbr, the Enterprise Social Networking Platform.
tibbr Ideas is a tibbr app that’s an effective way to continually solicit, share, build upon, improve and manage ideas. Big ideas can come from anywhere, so tibbr’s social capabilities make it easy to get inspiration from anyone, regardless of their job title, department, or office location.
tibbr makes innovation cost-effective, too — in fact, Forrester Consulting reported in their Total Economic Impact™ study that tibbr reduced the cost of innovation and idea management by 30% over 3 years.
See how tibbr can help your big organization make the most of its employees’ “slices of genius” today — get a free trial of tibbr now.
