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Collective Genius: Leading Innovation and Digital Transformation
Through her interactions with prominent figures in business and society, Professor Linda Hill explores what is required from leaders to deliver the promise of technology and innovation. She has been interested in understanding the question, “What do exceptional leaders of innovation do?” More specifically, “What is the connection between leadership and innovation?” Many of these ideas are examined in the book Hill coauthored, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation.
KEY THEMES
To encourage innovation, leaders have to unleash the “slice of genius” each person has, which represents their talent and passion, says Hill. Once it is unleashed, it has to be harnessed or leveraged to make it useful. This requires leaders to amplify the differences that people have, to take advantage of the contributions each person can make to the organization, no matter what level that person is at. In fact, she says, many of the best ideas percolate from the bottom up.
According to Hill, there are three interconnected capabilities necessary for innovation:
- Creative abrasion—encouraging a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse without recrimination.
- Creative agility—learning how to experiment quickly and cheaply, then iterate, get feedback, and adjust.
- Creative resolution––curating all of the ideas that have been assembled and determining which should be implemented.
Hill says that failure is part of the process—that you cannot plan the path to an innovation. Instead, you have to act your way there. Other key factors that encourage innovation are the vision leaders bring to the table and the sense of purpose that those within an organization need to have.
FUTURE SCOPE
In order to take advantage of emerging technologies to innovate and create differentiated customer experiences, people in organizations have to work differently, Hill says. Corporations are finding that digital transformation often demands culture change and the development of new organizational capabilities. For this to succeed in an organization, people need to work in a more collaborative fashion so that they can pursue discovery-driven activities that lead to innovative solutions.
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