By day, I work at the University of Waterloo. This afternoon I attended one of the keynote addresses that was part of the 2010 Staff Conference.
Jeremy Gutsche, Chief Trend Hunter at TrendHunter.com was speaking, and his talk was entitled, “Creating a Culture of Innovation and Customer Obsession.” (Incidentally, Jeremy’s company, which is located in Toronto, has hired 12 uWaterloo co-op students over the years.)
Here are a few of the most memorable moments for me:
1. Your organization always needs to have a clear and compelling answer to the question: Specifically what are you trying to do?
2. Times of crisis and chaos present incredible opportunites for organizations that have their eye on new trends and are on the look-out for consumer needs emerging out of the crisis.
3. “Complacency will be the architecture of your downfall. … There is no point innovating if you think you already know all the answers!” Organizations often try to get better by optimizing their current products and processes slightly, rather than being open to completely re-thinking what they do.
4. In any industry, innovation starts by observing your customers and interacting with them. You need to understand and become irresistable to your target audience.
5. For your messages to make a huge impact in this information-saturated world, they must be simple, direct, and supercharged.
Jeremy’s talk was very entertaining and thought-provoking on many fronts. But what struck me the most was what he said about making space to be innovative.
uWaterloo is, of course, the perfect place to have this discussion, since (in Canada, at least) we’re generally recognized as having cornered the market on innovation.
There is no doubt that uWaterloo has had quite a number of high-profile world-changing innovations in its short history. But within my team in the Office of Development, the topic of innovation has come up a lot lately, and we’ve been asking ourselves some tough questions.
When we look at our programs and how we do business from day to day, can we honestly say we’re innovative?
My team agreed that there is no shortage of creative ideas. Most of the people I work with are smart, motivated, and committed to uWaterloo’s success. We come away from most of our brainstorming sessions with page upon oversized page of great ideas.
But my colleagues also agreed that we are not nearly as good at nurturing these ideas and seeing them all the way through to the end — from analyzing their merit, to coming up with a plan, to implementing them, to measuring their success, to learning from our mistakes.
So if we admit we’re not as innovative as we’d like to be, what are we to do?
Jeremy shared some interesting things about how an organization can be successful in this area. For one, it needs to be “institutionally tolerable to explore new pastures.” I think uWaterloo gets an ‘A’ for effort here — we are encouraged to think outside the box and have a high degree of freedom to imagine innovative ways of doing things.
But Jeremy also pointed out that new ideas don’t flourish well when constrained by rigid control processes, and where there isn’t a willingness to fail.
This raises some interesting questions for an enormous institution like uWaterloo, and I put them out there for discussion:
1. Is it possible for a big organization, which requires an extensive bureaucracy to function, to be nimble enough to nurture and sustain true innovation?
2. Is uWaterloo’s culture one where failure is accepted as an important part of innovating?
3. What would it take for uWaterloo to become truly, undeniably, and consistently innovative — all the way from our day-to-day microprocesses to our institutional aspirations?
