It seems necessary that, after the desirable levels of productivity and competitiveness, we display in our country a certain bold self-criticism, insofar as each person in charge corresponds; But it is also possible, for example, to focus more precisely on everything related to creativity and innovation -2009: European Year of Creativity and Innovation-, in case we were perhaps wasting human capital, or deploying efforts in the wrong directions.
We may not all give the same meaning to innovation, nor do we always agree when interpreting other signifiers.
Some time ago I ran into a headline in the economic press on a Sunday that highlighted the fact that our country, like others, had pending its subjects around the knowledge economy and innovation: something that was coming and is insisting.
I had been listening for about ten years about how the development of the Information Society - I believe that with this label politicians have been referring, in fact, to the Information Technology and Telecommunications Society - would lead us to the desired levels of productivity and competitiveness, and I set out to locate, locate, knowledge, good work, and innovation on that journey: on the causal journey that goes from information and communication technologies (ICT) to the prosperity pursued, passing through the inexorable crises, some deeper than others.
We have certainly been hearing about the Information Society for some time, and its alter ego, the Knowledge and Innovation Economy. After a modest participation in a working group around the then Minister Josep Piqué, I attended the Symposium "The Information Society for All", on April 13, 1999, in Madrid. Then I published a column, from which it seems appropriate to reproduce this paragraph ten years later:
“Antes de la primera pausa para café, uno podía caer en la tentación de fundir la idea de Sociedad de la Información con Internet, y lo cierto es que esta Red está revolucionando sensiblemente nuestros hábitos domésticos y laborales. Pero Internet es sólo un medio más, aunque de muy creciente uso: lo que realmente está ocurriendo es que pasamos de una sociedad de consumo (a secas), a una sociedad de consumo, sobre todo, de información, por diferentes medios…”.
I already believed then that we should not confuse information with computer science, even though the first time we access it mainly through ICT (information and communication technologies). These allow us, in effect, to reach the information sought (first step), the information then allows us to reach the necessary knowledge (second step), knowledge enables us to act (third step), and at the same time enables us to innovate (fourth step), doing it without reinventing anything or being extravagant. Everything is really more complex, but ICTs, by themselves, do not guarantee productivity and competitiveness: a truism that I am not ashamed to formulate (it almost seems essential to me to do so).
It was around this time, on the end of the century, that I wanted to document myself and explore the strengths and faculties of the expert professional of our days; to those more aligned with lifelong learning (translation of information into knowledge), with the cultivation of thought and with the ability to innovate. Innovation already seems to be everyone's business, and management styles - I thought - should better tune with new realities and needs, and thus properly catalyze the expression of human capital. Then I came across a very interesting book by John S. Rydz, which seemed to dig deeper into this idea and provided me with many others.
On the meaning of innovation
I think that innovation has been invoked from different perspectives and with different purposes and meanings. Just as there seem to be other conceptual distances not always well resolved - for example, the one already suggested between the computer society and the information society, or the equally sensitive one between human capital and human resources, or perhaps even between abstraction and delirium-, I think we could be merging, if not sometimes confusing, innovation with mere technological renewal, with cultural and operational changes, or with the continuous improvement of the products and services offered. It seems appropriate to me, already in 2009, to nurture the idea of innovation as a contribution to a kind of healthy quantum leap in the uses and customs of society, and that is why I present these reflections for your consideration.
I have always been interested in innovation, perhaps due to my professional beginnings. In 1971, at the age of 20, I joined the Research Center of the International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) in Madrid, and there, in a building that Anaya would later occupy in Josefa Valcárcel street, I was working for several years. First I was surprised by what seemed to me a singular - perhaps unusual at that time - approximation of the hierarchical levels, but then I was also noticing the efforts to generate valuable novelties in the offer of products of that singular company, then associated with ITT, which was Standard Eléctrica, and that all of us had seemed exemplary in the stage of Márquez Mira and Márquez Balín.
Already as a training consultant, I tried to follow as far as possible the advances in content and methods related to permanent professional development and, I do not know why, I ended up -I am talking about 2005 and 2006- interested in the acroamatic teaching of conferences and storytelling. Attracted, yes, by the curious and sobering stories about the business world, I soon turned to a specific area: it was, of course, that of innovation. In fact, the cases, for example, of velcro, of the microwave oven, of the Sony Walkman, of McDonald's, of Teflon, of vulcanized rubber, of cyanoacrylate sticking, of sucralose, of X-rays, are very instructive. of what was later called acetylcholine, of the domestic sewing machine, of vaccines, of penicillin, etc.
When a company incorporates in its products and processes the advances produced in the respective fields -and certainly in the field of ICT-, it is undoubtedly renewing its operation and its offer to the market, and it should not stop doing so; but, when speaking of innovation, each company, protected by the capacities and strengths of its people, would have to pursue, more or less visibly, the objective of being unique -as Ridderstrale says-; to anticipate the others and offer valuable news to the market, beyond agilely incorporating the advances in technology and automating its processes. For this, it has, above all, its human capital.
All of us, managers and skilled workers, can approach innovation, the hallmark of this emerging economy, through various paths and means: curiosity, creativity, research, ingenuity, chance, intuition, imagination, connections, inferences, hypotheses, abstractions…, without forgetting perseverance, critical thinking or insight. All this overlaps in each innovative individual, but without a doubt he must be an expert in his field, endowed with sufficient explicit, tacit and intuitive knowledge, in order not to be extravagant or reinvent the wheel. Let's look at the three adjectives added to knowledge: explicit, and therefore conscious; tacit, which we link with accumulated experience; and intuitive, which comes to take advantage of unconscious knowledge (inherited or acquired),among other possible sources from which such a singular faculty - the genuine intuition - is nourished.
Indeed, not a few advances in physics, medicine and other scientific branches have occurred because experts have benefited from their unconscious knowledge - sometimes also manifested in dreams (Loewi, Howe, Kekulé…) -, as they have done likewise of chance, of successive hypotheses, of valuable connections, of his imagination and of his curiosity. Although we are not scientists, we do constitute, through our desire to learn and create, through our own professionalism, a kind of micro-centers for research and development. In this 21st century, knowledge -and thought workers- are generators of ideas and initiatives, and the most intelligent organizations catalyze the materialization of this capacity.
Some advances in knowledge - think, for example, in Galileo's defense of heliocentric cosmology - succumbed to solid resistance from the establishment, and we can learn from this; others, such as Einstein's photoelectric effect, went through the hypothesis phase until they could be proven; still others, such as Fleming's penicillin or Roentgen's X-rays, were produced because an individual knew how to take advantage of chance and realize previously hidden possibilities. Casual discoveries - serendipitous - have indeed advanced science, but they have also facilitated the appearance of new products and services in the business world.
From the innovative professional
In the neosecular panorama we speak, often and certainly, of the figure of the expert professional, of the permanent and innovative learning individual that companies demand, of the worker loyal to his profession and lover of things well thought out and well done, of the one who, In addition to managing your time, you have to manage your attention and your ability to think well. But in reality, the past, remote or recent, offers us sobering examples of this profile and helps us to visualize it: how far, for example, could Genrich Altshuller's invaluable capacity for abstraction have gone in the society of the 21st century? Specific faculties or strengths characterized creative entrepreneurs of the 20th century, such as Masaru Ibuka, Ray Kroc, George de Mestral, Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega and so many others?
Well, we can also jump to the previous century, the XIX: Charles Goodyear, Graham Bell, Edison, Nikolaus Otto, Nikola Tesla… At our level and without giving up being unique, we all have to deploy powers and strengths like those of so many characters that contributed to innovation in different fields, either by going into the terra incognita of their field and adding new knowledge, or modifying the existing one, as the heliocentric astronomers did, or happened with aspirin, which replaced salicylate, with serious side effects.
In our time, in addition to learning to work -and live- with the best individual and collective results, we have to strive more specifically in "learning to learn", "learning to think" and "learning to innovate", much more beyond, much beyond, the brainstorming sessions that are usually orchestrated, and the efforts of continuous improvement in processes, products and services. Surely organizations - as living systems that are, and of course individuals - as fundamental assets of the economy have to do it - learn to learn, also think and also innovate -; But let's move on, since we have to have the right attitude: the volitional elements are, without a doubt, as cardinal in the innovative challenge as in the productivity challenge.
Of innovative culture
On the organizational conditions that promote genuine innovation, we learned, for example, the study (Corporate Creativity) by Robinson and Stern, and its six solid postulates, and I also found the recommendations of John S. Rydz, in Managing Innovation, extremely interesting; But now I would remind you of the Swedish professor Göran Ekvall's decalogue. For him, a catalyst culture of innovation foresees a way of working that incorporates:
1. The involvement and commitment of people.
2. Autonomy in professional performance.
3. The time to think.
4. Corporate receptivity to new ideas and initiatives.
5. The absence of entrenched interpersonal conflicts.
6. Open and fluid communication.
7. Positive emotions.
8. The possibility of taking risks.
9. Functional dynamism (avoidance of routine).
10. Trust and openness between all people.
I actually ran into Ekvall reading a post from the American Management Association, authored by Charles Prather and Lisa Gundry. (I have had to document myself intensively in recent months -Ridderstrale, Humphrey, Waterman, Drucker, Senge, Csikszentmihalyi, Davenport, DeBono, Covey, Seligman, Porter, Marina, Mendelson… -, for the design of a higher course on innovation, although I approached it without awareness of the European Year in 2009).
Prather and Gundry highlighted the possibility of taking risks in companies, perhaps the most notable element of the decalogue. If, in the face of a failed innovative attempt, Management were to seek error and the culprit rather than focus on investigating the facts and learning from experience, then it seems clear that the innovative initiative would be inhibited, stifled, throughout the organization.
The company must count on that, together with achievements of different scope, there will also be mistakes. Obviously, initiatives have to be properly studied before being implemented, but this only reduces, not eliminates, the possibility of failure. There is no doubt that to survive you have to take risks, and of course you have to take full advantage of mistakes (learning), as well as successes. Both things, mistakes and successes, generate valuable lessons that must be recorded forever in the company's stock of experiences.
Smart organizations (whatever the model: Senge, Nonaka, Choo, Mendelson-Ziegler…) bet with advantage, because their cultivation of human capital increases the anticipation and prevention of failures and failures; all people think and anticipate, not for fear of reproaches, but for the desire for achievement that guides them after shared goals. In contrast, in an organization that avoids risks (risk-avoiding climate), staff try to cover themselves before making a decision: everyone sticks to procedures, committees are created, changes are distorted, etc.
I would also like to insist on the time to think. One of the possibilities for improving productivity is to do things right the first time, which has a different meaning in the knowledge age than it did in the industrial age. Perhaps more interested in following the procedure than in applying common sense, we may not be very used to thinking, and the fact is that it is now essential, and especially inexcusable if we focus on innovation, the subject at hand.
Innovation requires conceptual, analytical, synthetic, systemic, critical, connective, exploratory, inferential, searching, penetrating, lateral, abstractive thinking…; it requires resorting to our explicit and tacit knowledge, without forgetting the treasure of the unconscious, which we access through intuitive phenomenology. The truth is that we refer to the same ideal profile with different labels: knowledge worker, thinking worker, creative worker, learning worker. Lifelong learning, by the way, must lead us to learn what others already know, and also to learn what no one knows yet (explore, discover…).
Final messages
Surely, in the very functioning of organizations, a quantum leap has to be made, because it is not possible to advance in productivity, innovation and competitiveness without the necessary systemic perspective. I think that, among other pending subjects, we have the use of human capital and the corresponding establishment of ad hoc hierarchical relationships. In this regard I wonder if we are moving forward or backward, while I remember Tom Peters (the only time I have heard him live) denouncing the falsehood or cynicism with which executives speak of the importance of people in companies.
The truth is, I think Taylor did not ask the workers in his development of scientific management, and neither did Mayo in his Hawthorne experiments; But, in the era of knowledge and innovation, without undermining the role of management professionals, perhaps we should better focus the potential of expert professionals in the different technical fields. Perhaps, after the innovation and as Rydz suggests, managers should strive to catalyze the expression of human capital of their professionals, instead of perceiving them as mere employees, followers, resources, collaborators or subordinates; the "system" is undoubtedly complex, but let us not give up.
I hope that the celebration of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation enlightens us all in the orientation of efforts, and while we, at Nanfor Ibérica, have wanted to contribute to the creation of a digital course on genuine innovation in companies, sponsored for the Avanza Formación Plan, in whose instructional script I have invested more than 150,000 words, including exercises, diagrams, photos, etc. Without a doubt, we must all make better use of our cognitive and intrapersonal faculties after the generation of valuable innovations, because, even after overcoming the deep economic crisis that we are going through, serious challenges of productivity and competitiveness await us in the 21st century.
