Innovation Now: Clearing Out Your Old Garage

By Chris Blauth Your garage is probably much like mine – a humble space stuffed with cars, bikes, paint cans, scrap two-by-fours, and much, much more. Every so often I haul everything out, sweep, purge, and donate. And no one cares except my family. Yet many see one extraordinary garage as a national treasure: 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California, where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded their company.  Innovation poured from that garage, as it does now from HP locations worldwide. Today, 367 Addison symbolizes the lone genius – or pair of geniuses – whose ideas and their tangible expression leave an indelible mark on us all. But a recent AchieveGlobal study adds new kinks to that inspiring story. We set out to discover what today’s mature and emergent organizations do – garage or no garage – to reap the rewards of innovation. Since lone geniuses are tough to track down, we interviewed executives and managers from top companies – leaders who play a central role in innovation, and who share DNA with the Hewlett and Packard of Addison Avenue. This worldwide primary research found four main conditions that support innovation today:

• Environment. This is the cultural side of innovation – the expectation, the encouragement, and most of all the permission to question and offer concrete alternatives. In a note of caution, many veteran innovators told us that creating the right culture can be challenging for an established, by-the-book company with a history of success.
• Systems. Along with environment, systems and processes aligned with culture often came up as a necessary condition for innovation. The main message? Culture without discipline stifles execution. As a Takata manager told us, “That loose environment on the front end and tight environment on the back end helps the products to go through.”
• Top-down support. In the past, innovation at the front line didn’t’ t require much buy-in from executives. Today, passionate executive commitment is vital. “Without that, you can’ t do anything,” said a manager at Gale. Only executives can make innovation a priority and align leaders at all levels. Said a Stabilo executive, “All decision makers have to believe in what you’re doing. They need to be as courageous as you are.”
• Collaboration. Leaders told us that innovation requires collaboration within groups and among departments, functions, divisions, brands, sites, and countries. “There’s almost nothing you could achieve by your own knowledge or expertise,” said a Toshiba manager. To encourage collaboration, innovative leaders find ways for all to learn from technical experts, experienced hands, customers, and even competitors.

All this is a long way from my cluttered garage – just as modern companies, including HP, are a long way from 367 Addison. While innovation at its root hasn’t changed, rarely now does the lone genius emerge with a world-beating product, or even a fully-developed idea. Today’s complex global challenges require motivated groups to collaborate across boundaries in a conducive environment, with needed systems aligned, all driven by the passionate support of executives. This is the core message of our research for all who would equal the achievements of Hewlett and Packard.