Collaborate to Innovate: Five Ways

Research shows that innovation is virtually impossible without collaboration.

Interaction Associates' former Senior Consultant Susan DeGenring identifies five qualities of innovation, and maps the collaborative behaviors that enable them. 

We live in an era of rapid progress, where companies look to innovation as a key source of competitive advantage. While the "secret" to successful innovation is elusive, we know that the ability to collaborate is one essential ingredient. A substantial body of research supports the conclusion that collaborative idea generation across the organization is a requirement for innovation.* Research has also confirmed that a high degree of collaboration within teams is a good predictor for a highly innovative organization.**

Teams will find certain behaviors especially helpful in shaping a collaborative process for innovation. We've identified five unique qualities of innovation, and mapped these to specific collaborative behaviors that support them.

1) Innovation is iterative.

Generating innovative ideas - and the best means to implement them - is born from the integration of many individuals' collective efforts. In order for this integration to occur, team members must truly hear one another's perspectives to capture the innovative opportunities inherent in their collective ideas. This requires team members trust one another, demonstrated by their willingness to be influenced by each other, sharing their ideas and allowing others to build upon and give them new dimension or meaning.

2) Innovation can be creatively disruptive to team cohesion.

Creativity is often born out of diversity of opinion. But a team needs to stay in conversation long enough, when disagreement has emerged, to access the intelligence held in the different points of view. So, teams who innovate must also be able to disagree and then find ways to reconcile conflict in order for innovative ideas to surface and thrive. Innovative teams are those that also tolerate temporary disharmony, suspending the need for decision making and action while the differences between perspectives are allowed to brew and resolve.

3) Innovation can be unpredictable and inefficient.

Often the team won't know which of its ideas might become critical at later stages of development. The unpredictability requires that a team remain flexible in its processes and structures. They have to be able to learn from and respond to important discoveries as they arise. The most successful team leaders know how to facilitate the discovery process for the greatest balance between inclusion and business efficiencies, without over-controlling the outcome. And, team members must know how to build agreement from a variety of points of view in order to more forward.

Truly innovative teams also develop and use participative meeting management, discussion and recording processes that allow members to explore and capture data and ideas so that a diversity of perspective is available to the creative process over a period of time.

4) Innovation is risky.

Teams have to be able to try lots of things, and be able to fail. In a study of innovative organizations***, managers invariably identified two critical elements for innovation: support for risk taking and change, and tolerance of mistakes. A true measure of a team's capacity to innovate is the number of failures it is willing to accept to birth the true innovation. A team climate characterized by collaborative, mutually supportive relationships enables team members to take risks to innovate.

5) Innovation is a group activity.

That means team members must share responsibility for the team's process, climate and outcomes. Mining knowledge from different sources of expertise means asking for help, and being willing to accept it. Conversely, the most successful teams report learning how to build enough trust to be able and willing to relinquish ownership of ideas and innovations, while sharing the risk.

Achieving successful innovation – and reaping its benefits – means mastering the behaviors that lead to collaborative innovation. As Keith Sawyer, researcher and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration****, notes, "We’re drawn to the image of the lone genius whose mystical moment of insight changes the world. But the lone genius is a myth; instead, it’s group genius that generates breakthrough innovation…Collaboration drives creativity because innovation always emerges from a series of sparks––never a single flash of insight."

Citations:
*Paulus, P. B. and Nijstad, B.A., 2003, Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration, Oxford University Press, U.S., p. 257.
**Ibid.
***Tushman and O'Reilly, 1997, Winning Through Innovation Harvard Business School Press, Boston, p.113
****Sawyer, K., 2007, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, Westview Press