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What Innovation? Stop Trying So Hard

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Innovation. These days, there’s hardly a mission statement that doesn’t include it, or a CEO who doesn’t promote it. Yet in most organizations creativity isn’t exactly flourishing.

Maybe that’s because we’re trying too hard to formalize it. A study at M.I.T. found that 80 percent of the breakthrough innovations in products and services did not occur in training sessions or formal meetings. Rather, dynamic innovation was almost always the result of informal (even chance) encounters.

I help organizations find innovative solutions to business challenges. I’ve consulted with clients in the public and private sectors to develop collaborative meetings -- and I know the power of well-structured interaction to stimulate a group’s ability to think creatively.

But 80 percent! There’s a statistic that’s hard to ignore. And it isn’t only research studies that support this finding. Highly creative organizations live it!  Steve Jobs once put it this way: “At Apple, innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.”

In other words, innovation is less a product of structured processes and more a result of informal conversations.

Obviously, it helps to have the right kind of culture in place for innovation to flourish - but creative conversations don’t happen because of a CEO mandate or a task force charter. Instead, they emerge organically in organizations as a byproduct of routine interpersonal interaction.

Creative synergies are often facilitated by employees with multiple networks throughout the organization. Friendships bring trust, inviting an even deeper level of communication. Social networks, personal relationships, employees with diverse connections across divisional boundaries – this is the real foundation for breakthrough innovation.

Want to dramatically increase your organization’s “creativity quotient?” It may be simpler than we thought. It may be as simple as hiring great people, making sure they meet one another, and letting them talk.