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Cultural differences drive innovation, conference hears.

Article Excerpt
The global economic downturn will accelerate the emergence of new forms of innovation, according to speakers at the Financial Times innovation conference held in London last November. They'll be driven by new attitudes toward collaboration among "digital natives," young adults who have grown up with ubiquitous communications.

The management challenge will be to understand these attitudes and adapt companies to make the best of them, or to find alternative approaches to innovation that stem from other cultures.

Innovation at the Top

"The top 15 percent of companies will continue to innovate, and the top 5 percent will actually successfully accelerate their innovation initiatives," predicted Mark Turrell, CEO of Imaginatik, a seller of software and services to enhance corporate innovation. "But the bottom group of companies--the largest portion--will have innovation initiatives decimated, as companies focus on cost reduction and survival."

Turrell said the key business focuses for 2009 until 2011 will be cost reduction, process efficiency, doing more with less, and positioning for an upturn. "We all need to change the way we work, right now."

He argued that we are at a pivotal point in human history, in which people's attitudes and motivations are changing very rapidly. "The personal need to be recognized within your peer group has changed in the past two or three years. People now want to have a sense of purpose in their lives."

Turrell pointed to other factors that are reshaping the context for innovation, such as the way that some resources, such as brain power and communications channels, are becoming abundant where formerly they were scarce. "Abundant systems operate by completely different rules from scarce systems," he said. "For example, you can turn a brainstorm of four people in a room into a brainstorm of a thousand people online."

Turrell argued that companies will have to learn to apply such abundant resources, working in much larger collaborations, drawing on the skills of customers and competitors as well. "With co-creation you can be as smart as everybody in the room," he said. "Collective genius is a critical asset that we will need to understand."

The challenge for leaders will be to "let go" and recognize that they (and their colleagues) are not always the smartest people...