Power of Paradox - Focused Innovation

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This month LinkedIn published its inaugural list of the Top 15 Skills on the Rise. Innovative Thinking was #5 on the list. Innovation is the growth engine of a company. Without innovation, many companies will eventually fail.

Innovation is a familiar topic for me as I spent a significant part of my career leading teams that commercialized new chemical processes as part of the corporate research and development (R&D) group for Lonza’s former specialty chemical business. Lonza is a 150+ year old chemical company with world class scientists and engineers that produced the active pharmaceutical ingredient for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna was a relatively new company, having just gone public in 2018, and did not have the manufacturing capabilities in-house to make the vaccine, so they partnered with Lonza.

Harrison Assessments Focused Innovation Paradox

Lonza is a Swiss company and for the past 14 years, Switzerland has ranked as the #1 innovative country in the world on the Global Innovation Index from the World Intellectual Property Organization. There is a high cost of doing business in Switzerland so without innovation it would be very challenging for Swiss companies to remain competitive, especially in the chemical and pharmaceutical sector like Lonza which accounts for almost 50% of Swiss exports.

What we can learn from that has contributed to Lonza’s success is combining innovation with collaboration. Collaborative accountability is a paradoxical leadership skill and a subject of an earlier article. In this article, we will unpack the paradox of focused innovation which is directly related to innovative thinking.

What is Focused Innovation?

Dr. Harrison defines focused innovation as the tendency to combine persistence AND inventiveness to achieve a goal. Focused innovation consists of two behavioral traits:

-           Experimenting: The tendency to try new things and new ways of doing things

-           Persistent: The tendency to be tenacious despite encountering significant obstacles

Image: Paul L. Fishbein, Ph.D.

I’ve scaled up and commercialized quite a few products over my career. We would take a formulation or process that a chemist had developed in the lab and figure out how to make large quantities of that material. It typically involved many experiments and often some of the experiments would not go as planned. That was to be expected. I used to tell my teams that the only wasted experiment is one that we don’t learn from. We learned as much from the experiments that did not work as we did from the ones that worked. We would sometime intentionally push the boundaries of what we knew would work because it was better to make a smaller quantity of “bad” material in the lab than a large quantity of bad material in the production facility.

When we ran into a series of “bad” experiments, there were times when I wasn’t sure how to solve the problem but what I can share is that when we kept persisting, most of the time, we were able to figure out the solution and as a result be able to successfully commercialize a new process or product.

What can help us with Focused Innovation?

There are two critical points in this process that can help or hurt innovation:

1.       The leaders’ reaction when innovation becomes challenging.

The early stages of innovation are usually a lot of fun. The team is excited and motivated to work on the latest, greatest thing.

It’s the middle stage of innovation that typically makes or breaks the project. When challenges appear and the team starts to lose motivation because nothing they try seems to be working. This is when persistence becomes critical.

It’s the leader’s job to keep the team motivated and working together. When problems arise, having high levels of trust and psychological safety on the team becomes critical.

2.       The level of openness the team has to new ideas.

Experimenting has to do with our individual willingness to try new things. Openness is related to where those ideas come from. This behavioral trait is part of another Harrison Assessments paradox called insightful curiosity. When we are willing to listen to others input, this often results in more innovative ideas.

Openness is important both at the beginning of the innovation cycle and when the team is having problems during the innovation cycle.

·        Brainstorming as a group is counterproductive and can stifle innovation. Adam Grant recommends teams submit ideas individually and then discuss them collectively without revealing who submitted which idea when they brainstorm. This allows the best ideas to rise to the top by minimizing subconscious biases.

·        When the team encounters problems, it becomes especially important that team members are open to listening to different perspectives so that everyone can “see” the same problem or “elephant” and not just part of the “elephant”. That is what can often lead to a breakthrough in innovation.

How else can we develop Focused Innovation?

The first steps to developing focused innovation are (1) understanding how both traits complement each other and (2) becoming aware when you might overuse or undervalue one trait without the other.

Another step is to take your team through Harrison Assessments so they can understand and appreciate each other’s paradoxical behavior preferences. Each team member would go through an individual debrief and receive a paradox report showing their focused innovation and insightful curiosity paradoxes before the team workshop. Here is an example:

Harrison Assessments Focused Innovation and Insightful Curiosity Paradoxes

The next paradox we will unpack will be insightful curiosity. Join Claritas’ newsletter for updates on this and future blogs using this link.

You can also contact us to discuss your team development needs or follow us on LinkedIn for more useful leadership resources and frameworks, including Paradoxical Leadership. If you find this article helpful, please share it with others!