Collective, Collaborative Innovation: Do’s and Don’ts

According to Frans Johansson, “When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas. The name I have give this phenomenon, the Medici Effect, comes from a remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth-century Italy.”

He agrees with Richard Dawkins who suggests (in The Selfish Gene) that ideas, or memes, compete, in a real sense, for space in our minds. Hence the importance of a process for collective, collaborative generation and refinement of ideas. In terms of both the number of people and the number of ideas, “the more the merrier.”
 

Here is what Johansson recommends

What to Avoid

1.  Associative limits and barriers that exclude anyone and anything from the process that is “different,” “doesn’t fit,” etc.
2.  Arbitrary deadlines that eliminate ideas too soon
3. Disagreement and conflict that become personal
4. Failure to execute ideas (“the greatest failure of all”)
5. Loss of motivation

What to Ensure

1. Diversification of participants (e.g. expertise, perspectives, and approaches)
2. Recognition of trends and patterns that can be integrated
3.  “Intersection hunting” (i.e. searches for connections in unlikely places and see where they lead)
4. Ignition and explosion of ideas
5. Sufficient time for evaluation of ideas

Frans Johansson is the author of The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, published by Harvard Business Review Press (2006).

OTHER SUGGESTED READINGS

The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm (2001)
The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization (2005)
Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman

The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works, How to Do It (2011)
Scott D. Anthony

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results (2009)
Morten T. Hansen

Morten Hansen on “How Great Leaders Make Their Own Luck”

Morten Hansen is a professor at University of California, Berkeley, and at INSEAD, France. He was previously a professor at Harvard Business School for a number of years. Prior to joining Harvard University, Hansen obtained his Ph.D. from the business school at Stanford University. In addition to his academic career, Hansen was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in the London, Stockholm and San Francisco offices. He was part of the research teams for the international best-selling books Built to Last and Good to Great. Hansen’s research on collaboration has won several prestigious awards, including the best article awards from Sloan Management Review and Administrative Science Quarterly, the leading academic journal in the field. Several of his Harvard Business Review articles have been bestsellers for a number of years. He regularly consults with companies on collaboration and gives keynotes at leadership conferences. His new management book is Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results (Harvard Business School Press, 2009) and, more recently, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, co-authored with Jim Collins (HarperBusiness, 2011). A native of Norway, Hansen holds a Master’s degree in finance from London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from Stanford University where he was a Fulbright scholar.

To watch an interview of Morten during which he shares his thoughts about “How Great Leaders Make Their Own Luck” please click here.

To read my interview of Morten and Jim Collins, please click here.

 

 

 

Harvard Business Review on Collaborating Effectively: A book review by Bob Morris

Harvard Business Review on Collaborating Effectively
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (2011)

How and why to establish and then nourish mutually high-impact partnerships within and beyond your organization

This is one of the volumes in a series of anthologies of articles that first appeared in HBR. In this instance, its nine articles focus on one or more components of a process by which to join forces to answer the most important questions and to solve the toughest problems.

Having read all of the articles when they were published individually, I can personally attest to the brilliance of their authors’ (or co-authors’) insights and the eloquence with which they are expressed. Two substantial value-added benefits should also be noted: If all of the articles were purchased separately as reprints, the total cost would be at least $60-75; they are now conveniently bound in a single volume for a fraction of that cost.

Here in Dallas, there is a Farmers Market near the down area at which several merchants offer slices of fresh fruit as samples. In that spirit, I now provide a brief excerpt that is indicative of the high quality of all nine articles:

In “Which Kind of Collaboration Us Right for You?” Gary P. Pisano and Roberto Verganti acknowledge that, as potential innovation partners and ways to collaborate with them proliferate, it’s tough deciding how best to leverage outsiders’ power.” Pisano and Verganti recommend understanding the four basic collaboration modes:

• In the open, hierarchical mode, anyone can offer ideas but your company defines the problem and chooses the solution.

• In the open, flat mode, anyone can solicit and offer ideas, and no single participant has the authority to decide what is or isn’t a valid innovation.

• In the closed, hierarchical mode, your company selects certain participants and decides which ideas get developed.

• In the closed, flat mode, a select group is invited to offer ideas. But participants share information and intellectual property and make critical decisions together.

Other articles I especially enjoyed include Morten T. Hansen’s “When Collaboration is Bad for Your Company,” Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson’s “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” Roger Martin’s “The Execution Trap,” and Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis’ “Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership.”

If asked to select only one book that provides the most valuable material to supplement what is offered in this volume, it would be Hansen’s Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, published by Harvard Business School Press (2009). In it, Hansen explains why “bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration.” Here are two of several reasons. First, bad collaboration never achieves “big results”; worse yet, bad collaboration makes good collaboration even more difficult to plan and then achieve. Hansen explains how to create a culture of collaboration while accelerating the development of high-impact teams.