Great Innovation is Born Out of Collaboration

  

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Earlier this month, the New York Times included an opinion piece on ‘The Rise of the New GroupThink’ written by Susan Cain, author of the forthcoming book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

In the article, Cain speaks to the failure of brainstorming as a method for stimulating creativity and argues collaboration is not all it is hyped up to be:  “Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.”

Many would argue that research has revealed just the opposite: great innovation and creativity is almost always born out of collaboration – out of knowledge derived from outside one’s experience, domain, company, etc.  and applied in a new way.

While brainstorming continues to be a common method to try and shake out the cobwebs and draw out new ideas from teams, in practice the outcome of brainstorming often falls short.    Psychological inertia, hidden agenda, lack of insight can stall creativity.

The reality is: brainstorming doesn’t create new ideas.  It simply helps people tap into what they have forgotten they know.  But to deem collaboration a failure as well is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Collaboration is much more than simply getting people around a conference table to brainstorm. Collaboration - both passive and active - is about connecting innovation workers to the knowledge, people, insights and expertise they need in order to solve problems and uncover solutions.  Collaborating means making experience, best practices and lessons learned available to innovation practitioners and in the context of the problems they are trying to solve.

Too often, companies tend to build organizational silos that cut workers off from key information and from each other. 

Innovation thrives when knowledge flows through the enterprise to the workers that need it.  This knowledge is often not documented, residing in the minds of the workers.  This is why it is essential to enable the connection of people to people based on what they know.  The more relevant knowledge they have access to, the more ease with which innovation practitioners can access that knowledge in a useful way, the more likely they are to make the connections that produce that moment of creative synthesis. The right collaboration framework can help make this happen. 

Conversely, the wrong framework can create frustration as workers feel it is difficult to connect and share knowledge and leverage that knowledge in their work.  Many employees find that tools are not compatible and that it is difficult to capture their collaborative exchanges in a meaningful way that can leveraged.

Collaborating and connecting innovation practitioners to the right knowledge at the right time is key to increasing the productivity of an organization’ brainstorming sessions - and to driving success across all innovation activities.