Horse whisperer
From Innovationclass
My Innovative Organization
Creating and maintaining an organization of twenty-five people that is continually innovative would be a hard task to oversee in any field of business, culture, etc. To look at it on the level of a for-profit business is probably the easiest way to imagine trying to manage, though.
To make this happen, the business will need to begin with a thorough search for employees who exhibit positive attitudes. The employees will also need to enjoy being challenged, embrace changes in their work environment and be open to working hard with other individuals who they may or may not like in a personal relationship. Thus, it would be important to have a strong hiring manager in the early phase, but for a company this small it would not be critical to have a permanent HR position, unless the company saw substantial growth in the future. This company’s hiring process would be innovative in that not only would the applicant be evaluated based upon his or her resume and formal interview but also, team interviews by the firm’s other employees would be mandatory. This is because as the firm begins to accumulate good people, it would be important to keep those people involved and interested in the future of the business. Involving employees, at least on some level, in the hiring of new employees, would help develop the employees’ sense of how important they are to the firm. It would show that not only are their day-to-day activities crucial for success, but their input and expectations for new employees are considered, as well.
Overall, there would not be a lot of structure to the firm with regard to titles of employees. In such a small organization it seems that it would be more prohibitive to have people battle amongst themselves for a few, coveted “top” titles. Instead, depending on what the organization was in business for, it would be more fun to have employees self-develop and then group-approve their own descriptive job titles that were relevant to the kinds of tasks they performed for the firm. Of course, there would be about 4 or 5 employees who were considered “top-management” because someone has to run the business and occasionally guide and make decisions for the group, but overall, a more democratic business style would be the structure.
The democratic structure will be foundational to the business’ values and goals. Allowing employees the opportunity to voice their ideas among co-workers on all subjects concerning the firm would give each employee a sense of empowerment and importance. No one would feel like their role was limited to completion of their own tasks and that their input, otherwise, is unimportant to the firm. To facilitate openness and interaction there would be weekly meetings to discuss issues of business and anything else that comes up. In addition to meetings, the firm would keep an online message board that employees could contribute to, as they saw fit, on a variety of topics including both work and non-work related topics, within reason. The message board would be unique, though, because it would be made available to the public to allow for a more broad exchange of ideas and interaction outside the company (Note: the public board would be censored to protect trade secrets, confidential business ideas, etc).
The firm’s physical location and structure would also play an important role in creating and maintaining an innovative environment of business. It would be located in a large city (probably New York City) because there are many stimuli to give employees ideas and inspiration. The office would be located on a higher, large floor of an office building. The main work areas all would be situated along the outside of the floor so that everyone had the opportunity to look out the window while working. Everyone would have their own workspace/desk that he or she could personalize, but there would, also, be group work areas. Employees could choose to use the individual or group spaces to work as they saw fit relative to whatever project was at hand. Since all the offices and workspaces would be along the windows, the more central, interior part of the office floor would have communal things like an employee kitchen, copy room, restroom, etc. The décor of the office would be modern, trendy and fun. The idea would be to make employees feel excited, honored and like it was fun to be at work. It would be a place that was decorated so that one wanted to bring friends and family to the office to show off how “cool” their workplace is.
In order for the firm to become and remain innovative, it will be important for everyone to remain open-minded, communicative and aware of his or her surroundings. The democratic processes of the business will enable this firm to become and remain innovative. It will never become a dictatorship because that would crush the free-flow of ideas that are so important for any firm to recognize changes in the market place and the need to change with the times to remain competitive.
The Innovative Company I Chose
I've been researching 3M and there are a number of reasons why I'm so impressed with this company. To start, we are all very familiar with many of their brands such as Scotch, Post-it, Scotchgard, Scotch-Brite, Command, etc. To sum up a quote in a BusinessWeek article, 3M produces new and innovative products as if the company was still a startup and they are over 105 years old now! Plus, I find the variety of areas they work in totally fascinating - adhesives, advanced materials, biotechnology, films, nanotechnology, polymer melt processing, etc. My fascination with all these technical and science based areas comes from the fact that I have about 2 years worth of a chemistry/pre-med major under my belt (I think math is fun and chemistry is my favorite science)! Even though I'm a creative advertising major now I still find that I'm very interested in scientific and technological developments, but more as hobby-interest rather than something I'd like to pursue.
Anyway, here are a few links with information about 3M and their innovations:
3M Website
3M Innovation Machine
BusinessWeek Article
RD Mag link
Wikipedia on 3M
Innovation Blogs
What and why: (from the site) The blogger, Sanjay Dalal, is the President and Managing Director of Innovation Index Group, and CEO of Creativity And Innovation Driving Business.
Sanjay introduced The Innovation Index in December 2006 at his blog - Creativity And Innovation Driving Business - and has been publishing regular reports on The Innovation Index. These reports and The Innovation Index have obtained tremendous market coverage by the investment community at large including such websites as: Google Finance Home Page, Google Search (top page), Yahoo! Search (top page) InnovationTools.com, Denver Post, Boston Herald, Houston Chronicle, News.com, About.com, Marketwatch, Kiplinger Finance, Financial Content, Business Innovation Insider and more.
This site has in-depth technological information, rankings and insight on the same companies from the BusinessWeek list. This guy is on top of his game!
What and why: John Seely Brown…his name sounds familiar right (I hope all of you are shaking your heads yes)? Well, he was once the Chief Scientist of the Xerox Corporation and the Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Today, he calls himself the “Chief of Confusion,” but after reading some of the stuff on his website I’d say that’s somewhat of a misnomer. Anyway, he has posts about innovation, creation, etc that he writes AND he posts really great stuff that he finds from all sorts of other sources.
What and why: This blog is written by Clayton M. Christensen, a professor of Business Administration at the Harvard B-School. He co-founded Innosight, an organization that through consulting, executive education and research helps other organizations identify and exploit high potential growth opportunities, protect themselves against threats and better manage the process of innovation. Christensen is, also, the author of a number of books on innovation in business that been highly regarded by the business world.
A bonus on this blog is that there are nice categorizations along the side that make searching through the site easy!
What and why: Another champion of innovation, but this time it’s a guy named John Hagel who has quite an impressive educational and business resume. Schooled at Wesleyan, Oxford and Harvard (Law and B-School), he has also written many books, worked for companies such as BCG, McKinsey & Company and is currently heading a yet-to-be-named Silicon Valley start-up. Plus, he’s buddies with John Seely Brown (they seem like partners in crime when you look at his personal website: www.johnhagel.com), so clearly this guy has a lot of knowledge. Like many of the other blogs, his focuses on innovations in business and, also, cites other articles that do the same.
What and why: This site is actually called innovation.net, but that is not the website…funny how that works out. Regardless it is another good source of perspective on ways to innovate, how companies are trying to innovate, how they are succeeding or not and so on. Also, there is a list of great books related to innovation and a list of other innovation blogs on his site. The author’s name is Mike Docherty and he is the CEO of Venture2 Incorporated, a new ventures management company based in Boca Raton, FL. He has worked at a number of other companies in top management positions and has his MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg SOM.
What and why: This blog is completely focused on innovation and has been written since at least November 2005. The blogger is Jeffrey Phillips, the VP of Marketing and Sales at Innovate on Purpose, a company focused on innovation and idea management.
What and why: This site, ChangeThis, is an interesting aberration from the others in that there is not one single author who posts. Instead, many different people utilize this blog as a place to post documents/blogs/pdf’s about changes and innovation in virtually any field. It’s a refreshing break from the other blogs I’ve found.
What and why: This blog is called Dealing with Darwin and its tagline is “Business competitiveness in the 21st century with a focus on managing innovation and inertia.” And the blog is exactly that. What’s even more fascinating is that this guy, Geoffrey Moore, seems to have degrees in literature, not a fancy MBA…
BusinessWeek's Innovation Site
What and why: Here’s a no-brainer that I wish I had stumbled upon earlier in my search. This Innovation site by BusinessWeek has their articles on innovation as well as a number of blogs about innovation that are especially relevant to all of us in the J-school. There’s a NEXT blog, media blog, game blog, design blog and brand blog.
What and why: This blog follows the future of advertising in terms of the industry as well as technology. Pretty much everyone in this class is an ad major so we should probably all check in with this blog to see what is cited as the new innovations and trends. Plus, it has roots at MIT.
