103
Swope
Big corporations are set up not to innovate. In fact, there is a growing pile of evidence to suggest that most big corporations are better off looking outside of their own walls to innovate. Innovation fundamentally requires carefully assembled teams of people with multi-disciplinary perspectives, and most corporations traditionally prize homogeneity. Truly different perspectives are almost universally absent in most corporate cultures because, as corporations grow, they hire the same types of people over and over again (just look at how many “innovation” job descriptions include an “MBA preferred” line item) in order to slot them into scalable, operational roles to ensure operational consistency. It is this repetition of hiring the same sorts of people over and over again that creates what is called a “corporate culture.” And like any culture, a “corporate culture” is governed by a set of agreed-upon attributes, behaviors and visions of the world. Many a “corporate culture” will believe itself to be unique. However, this is often only an aspiration to uniqueness – comprised mainly of superficial brand attributes displayed in the context of competition. From the standpoint of a disinterested outsider, most “corporate cultures” are largely indistinguishable across competitive sets because they chase after similar objectives using similar people and practices. Pharmaceutical companies tend to have scientific cultures. Technology companies tend to have geek cultures. Universities have academic cultures. Design companies have creative cultures and so on. Many people often change jobs within competitive sets relatively easily, which further indicates that corporate cultures are not unique. While an identifiable “corporate culture” can be useful in rallying an organization to operationally deliver on its core value proposition, the cultural sameness within these internal teams hinders their ability to create new-to-theworld, disruptive offers. A significant cultural hurdle to disruptive innovation is that corporations are generally unable to justify hiring candidates with diverging perspectives because they are seen as being “not a cultural fit.” Meanwhile, under continual pressure to deliver profit and organic growth, CEOs in recent years have designated internal Innovation Departments. They typically appoint a Vice-President or Director of Innovation, charged with “making us more innovative.” Directors of Innovation spend their time evangelizing the value of innovation and disseminating new tools and methods of innovation across the company. If the appointment is done well, there will be substantial capital and political investment from leadership in assembling an innovation team to support the Director and the initiative. The team fans out across the silos of the organization, “matrixing” its way to innovation success, while leading a big culture change initiative to meet the CEO’s mandate of “making us more innovative.” A good result would be to fill the organization’s pipeline with many new ideas, a handful of which will then find their way to market, and a subset of those launched ideas will achieve some degree of success. This would then affect the culture, because as a market success becomes a case study, a case study becomes a story that binds the culture together around a new set of common beliefs and standards. Once these new common beliefs and standards are codified, they become operating principles and best practices and thus repeatable. Obviously, such initiatives need longer than the typical quarterly profit cycle—about two years minimum—to take effect, and if they work, they can be successful in achieving some kind of success about 10–15% of the time that they