Are Olympians born or made? Genes, physical characteristics, and preliminary skills play a key role in identifying the right person suitable for a sport. Once identified they need to develop the right skills and techniques to win the championship. Without going much deeper into analysis, we can conclude that Olympians are both born and made. Same rules apply when it comes to creativity and innovation skills. Creative people are also born first with a flair for thinking creatively and then those skills are nurtured and fine-tuned to become creative talents.
There is a huge demand for Innovation in business these days. Almost all the organizations are implementing innovation culture. They are providing necessary tools and resources to accomplish innovation targets. There are tools to collaborate across the organization, capture ideas, evaluate those ideas systematically and convert those ideas into projects. Although, companies are better focused on innovation these days there is a still a gap in treating innovation as a creative skill. To establish a good innovation practice, it is vital to master the techniques of identifying creative genes in every nook and corner of the organization or while hiring someone newly for an innovation job.
Express Lane Innovation is the process of identifying and nurturing creative talents within an organization. It helps to specialize in identifying various types of creative skills required for an organization. Organizations can master the art of nurturing creative talents, manage their ideas better and help them to innovate right products and services.
Since 2015 I started writing about bottom-up organization. Your question on, why a humble SAP consultant would talk about bottom-up organization is a long story, will park it for later. I always had this intuition that a high-performing organization would certainly be bottom-up.
We all know these organizations as top-down. When we talk about Apple as an organization, we remember Steve Jobs. When say Tesla, Elon Musk come to our mind and when we say Amazon, we remember hardworking Jeff Bezos. Are these companies Top-down? Yes, but not really. Are they bottom-up? No, but not really. The hidden fact is it is a mix of both.
Not just CXOs are visionary in these companies, but a good number of employees are equally visionary to come up with innovative and ground-breaking ideas. Such companies may have a system to receive and implement bottom-up ideas that are aligned with end goal. The most challenging part to tackle here is what ideas to receive? And, what not to receive? When there is a synergy there is a possibility of doing the things right but not doing the right things, like, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock for a joke on Jada Pinkett in Oscar 2022.
Every company has a bottom-up receiver in place, but they fail to receive right inputs from the right employees. To overcome this challenge, I came up with an idea called Express Lane Innovation in 2018. However, the starting point is still, how to identify the right person. Answer to this goes back to my original Post, where I talk about the Inside-out people. People who have the potential to expand or scale-up infinitely, who don’t become obsolete and who carry their own set of flawless rules.