Corporate innovation culture continues to be discussed among the Corante Innovation Network bloggers, who have been exploring the ways in which the kind of innovation culture your company has affects your ability to innovate.

Brent Edwards of Innovation Science cites an IBM CEO Global Study on Innovation that he recently reviewed that found corporate culture a definite impediment to innovation. Among Brent's points is that instituting an innovation process can help a negative innovation culture:

"If employees see that their company has gone to a great effort to recruit their ideas, they will be more likely to participate. A complete process needs to be in place for this to work, however, because recruiting ideas is only the first step in the process and without the right followup steps, employees will consider their efforts as wasted."

Paul Gladen from Chief Innovation Officer looks at this aspect of the culture puzzle: At what point do you hand off the new idea (and/or the resulting concept) to an operational group and go back to the pipeline to develop the next idea (I'm paraphrasing seriously here!). Paul's answer is that it depends on how radical and/or disruptive the new idea is:

"If it’s radical, different or disruptive to your existing business - chances are there’s no one you can reliably hand it over to. Existing operations probably won’t have the resources to build out something new, may not have the skills and almost certainly won’t have the incentives to do something that may compromise their existing activities."

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Phillips of Innovate On Purpose, who more or less started this entire discussion, moves on to describe two different corporate approaches to innovation: kissing frogs and picking horses, and advocates:

"I think there should be a happy medium. Few businesses can sustain a true "kissing frogs" approach once they reach a certain size and critical mass. There's just too much overhead, expectation and infrastructure to manage to create lots of small projects, each with little probability of success. However, limiting the pool of ideas and people who can work on them [the 'picking horses' approach] simply because the organization's culture can't adapt certainly doesn't make sense either."

In a comment to this post, Dave Bayless points out

"What if "horse picking" organizations were to collaborate with "frog kissing" organizations? It's not a new idea, of course. Old-school R&D organizations such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC famously kissed frogs, while other organizations placed bets on the most promising inventions. Similarly, venture capitalists and angel investors fund parallel experiments in technologies and business models, some of which become acquisition candidates for the Cisco's of the world."

"Probably a third of the people I spoke to [at the Front End of Innovation conference] felt stymied by their culture - to the point where they've given up trying to implement anything and are simply observers of innovation," says Jeffrey Phillips, one of several Corante contributors writing about corporate innovation cultures.

According to Jeffrey, the problems seem to come down to motivation, flexibility, and willingness to invest in innovation. His solution? "I think many innovators need a "get out of my corporate culture" free card."

Meanwhile, Rod Boothby writes about corporate cultures that rely too heavily on robotic, assembly-line-like processes for knoweldge workers. He says

"...you are surrounded by IT people who think that the first step in solving all your problems is to gather user requirements, and somewhere, try to find a robotic task or an assembly line process that can be automated....nstead of assuming that knowledge workers have a process that needs automating, or a work flow that needs controlling, [IT people should] ask what they do. Maybe they do not need an automation tool. Maybe they need a communication tool. Maybe they need things to help them be more creative."

Joyce Wycoff of Heads Up On Organizational Innovation has some positive news. She quotes a WSJ story about the CEO of WD-40, who instituted a policy of asking employees to share "learning moments" --

"A learning moment is a positive or negative outcome of any situation. But what it really is, is a culture where people are applauded and rewarded for sharing what works and what doesn't work. It's a freedom culture. It is one that takes away fear. I ran a 12-month program where every month I had people email me and share their learning moments. They would all get prizes and in the end we sent one of our employees on a fully paid trip around the world. The first month there were a few emails. Then as they saw they weren't being punished for this, more came."