Quanta Corporate Citizenship Reflections on innovation 06/08/2010
One of the major frustrations CSR leaders often share with us is that when they are trying to initiate something new they face enormous resistance inside their organisations, often in the many shades of ‘but no one else has done it’ or, even worse, ‘you don’t have experience doing it’.
As an organisation that often take very innovative approaches, we can sympathise with their frustration to some degree, because it is not rare for our potential clients to fire a ‘how long have you been operating?’ question as a tool to gauge our expertise.
This is particularly frustrating for some CSR practitioners as, unfortunately, their organizations still tend to place or perceive their place in relatively low levels of hierarchy, with modest mandates, despite their desire and abilities. And it gets worse, because CSR as a structured discipline is a relatively new idea, very few practitioners will actually have many years of experience as CSR practitioners (although many of them might have worked in related fields that have now been absorbed into CSR).
But CSR leaders also have an underlying mandate of educating those above them. They are the ones who have to build their credibility and show that they are able to deliver outstanding results despite their limited years in the area or their narrow remit.
If anything, they can be inspired by the work done by professor David Galenson, from the Economics Department of Chicago University. In his research, entitled 'Understanding Creativity', he found two very distinctive types of innovators: experimental and conceptual.
The first group is characterised by those who make progress based on their experience, on trial and error, on steady improvements; whilst the second group is characterised by sudden leaps forward in comparison to what others (and that person herself) have done in the past. Their innovation is not based on experience, but on connecting dots or thinking about things in a way that no one has managed to do before.
For the first group, experience is of great value. Think about scientists who spent decades in their labs to produce an innovative molecule, or artists, such as Cezanne, who made their greatest contributions later in their lives.
For the second group, as Galenson puts it, experience is less valuable than their “ability to recognise the gains from extreme departures from existing conventions, and this ability declines with experience, as fixed habits of thought develop”. Think about Einstein in his early years stuck in a patent office, with no academic qualifications or research experience: we wouldn’t have the theory of relativity today if he believed experience was relevant.
The words chosen by Galenson were very wise: “extreme departures from existing conventions”. And they imply something extra: enormous self-confidence to standout, to take the risk and seize the day. Leapfrog innovations are led by those who have the guts to try, even though no one has done it before. They know that the fact that no one has done it before does not mean that it cannot be done. For these individuals, professional experience is not relevant at all, courage and intellectual ability are. Professional experience might actually be detrimental because entrepreneurs and visionaries are generally those who do not conform, those who do not accept the status quo, and often, as Galenson realised, the greater the experience the more inclined the person will be to try to ‘fit in’ and to believe that innovations should happen steadily and gradually.
It is the job of CSR leaders, at least those who have the ambition to be real leaders, to educate their organisations that their remit needs to be expanded if those organisations expect CSR to add true strategic value and, by consequence, improve their top and bottom lines and generate impact to their beneficiaries.
As an organisation that often take very innovative approaches, we can sympathise with their frustration to some degree, because it is not rare for our potential clients to fire a ‘how long have you been operating?’ question as a tool to gauge our expertise.
This is particularly frustrating for some CSR practitioners as, unfortunately, their organizations still tend to place or perceive their place in relatively low levels of hierarchy, with modest mandates, despite their desire and abilities. And it gets worse, because CSR as a structured discipline is a relatively new idea, very few practitioners will actually have many years of experience as CSR practitioners (although many of them might have worked in related fields that have now been absorbed into CSR).
But CSR leaders also have an underlying mandate of educating those above them. They are the ones who have to build their credibility and show that they are able to deliver outstanding results despite their limited years in the area or their narrow remit.
If anything, they can be inspired by the work done by professor David Galenson, from the Economics Department of Chicago University. In his research, entitled 'Understanding Creativity', he found two very distinctive types of innovators: experimental and conceptual.
The first group is characterised by those who make progress based on their experience, on trial and error, on steady improvements; whilst the second group is characterised by sudden leaps forward in comparison to what others (and that person herself) have done in the past. Their innovation is not based on experience, but on connecting dots or thinking about things in a way that no one has managed to do before.
For the first group, experience is of great value. Think about scientists who spent decades in their labs to produce an innovative molecule, or artists, such as Cezanne, who made their greatest contributions later in their lives.
For the second group, as Galenson puts it, experience is less valuable than their “ability to recognise the gains from extreme departures from existing conventions, and this ability declines with experience, as fixed habits of thought develop”. Think about Einstein in his early years stuck in a patent office, with no academic qualifications or research experience: we wouldn’t have the theory of relativity today if he believed experience was relevant.
The words chosen by Galenson were very wise: “extreme departures from existing conventions”. And they imply something extra: enormous self-confidence to standout, to take the risk and seize the day. Leapfrog innovations are led by those who have the guts to try, even though no one has done it before. They know that the fact that no one has done it before does not mean that it cannot be done. For these individuals, professional experience is not relevant at all, courage and intellectual ability are. Professional experience might actually be detrimental because entrepreneurs and visionaries are generally those who do not conform, those who do not accept the status quo, and often, as Galenson realised, the greater the experience the more inclined the person will be to try to ‘fit in’ and to believe that innovations should happen steadily and gradually.
It is the job of CSR leaders, at least those who have the ambition to be real leaders, to educate their organisations that their remit needs to be expanded if those organisations expect CSR to add true strategic value and, by consequence, improve their top and bottom lines and generate impact to their beneficiaries.
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