In a thought-provoking keynote speech at The Premier Business Leadership Series in Berlin, Soumitra Dutta asked, "Are we born to innovative?" The answer, according to Dutta and a majority of hands raised in the audience is, Yes.
Children, for example, experiment, ask questions, observe and tolerate a high-level of risk, all of which are also key traits for innovators.
"So what happened to that spirit of exploration and innovation we had as children?" asked Dutta, the Roland Berger Chaired Professor at INSEAD and Director of elab@INSEAD. In his view, the educational system, and then (most) organiations have gotten very good at suppressing innovation. There are good reasons for this: primarily, that these organisations have to focus on repeatability, quality, reliability, cost-efficiency. Too often we become "victims of routine." We look for incremental changes to the status quo, rather than the big, innovative shift. But Dutta asks leaders, "Did you design your organisation for Innovation?’ – if not, then it begs another question: how to deal with the disruptive change that comes from outside your organisation?
Another major consideration is the impact of the internet on stimulating social and cultural change. Today’s young employees have never experienced life without the internet. They have expectations and behaviours derived from their experience of the world through the lens of pervasive connectedness and don’t understand traditional hierarchical leadership. This is both a curse and a blessing for the modern leader. A curse in that it is challenging to lead these people, a blessing in that they are the ones most comfortable with collaborating through the frontier of your business and therefore with valuable sources of potential innovation – your customers, your business partners and of course, they themselves.
My enduring take-away from this session will be that we need to create an environment that cultivates and nurtures innovation. Furthermore, we need also need to provide a platform for turning innovation on the "new normal."
