Creating Fertile Ground for Innovation

A guide to fostering innovation from within

There is a parable in the Bible called “The Parable of the Sower”. The parable describes a “sower”, who casts seeds into various places. Some take root and others don’t. What causes some to flourish while others fail to grow is not the seeds themselves, but the ground upon which they fall. 

I find this to be a good metaphor for innovation. Innovation doesn’t just happen. It needs fertile ground and the right conditions to nurture it and to help it grow. Where you cast the seeds of your ideas is critical to whether they blossom or wither. Even the best team with the best idea will fail without a good foundation.

Conditions for Innovation

Culture: Innovation is not a separate area of the company. Innovation should not be cordoned off and set to one side. The best innovation happens because the people closest to the product see an opportunity for an extension, a new job to be done, or an organic behavior that can be amplified. Often, companies build “innovation groups” to check that box, as if it is something that can just be scratched off a list and then dismissed. The problem is that they aren’t building it into the culture. Instead, innovation needs to be seen as an inherent mindset and a way of working. 

Leadership: Strong people need to be focused on a hard problem. Though general innovation should not be a separate team on an island, when a specific, real user problem has been identified, the best way to get started on it is to assemble a small team of people (five to seven) who are passionate about solving it. Amazon has a culture of taking someone successful, allowing them to be a single-threaded owner and giving them the autonomy to pull together a team from different areas to tackle a specific user issue. This allows them to calve off new teams from existing ones and scale quickly to work on new “jobs to be done” for users.  

Time and Space: Freedom begets innovation, and constraints strangle it. Too many constraints and requirements make it hard to move fast, iterate, and learn. Innovation requires a level of freedom to seek product-market fit, wherever it appears. Structure is important, but it should be used to guide innovation, rather than force it. How the process occurs within those guardrails shouldn’t be micromanaged. It is important that everyone agrees on what these guardrails are upfront, and then lets small teams explore and build. Tencent’s CEO encouraged his internal teams to compete with each other to see what messaging app would win (ref).  WeChat, now China’s dominant messaging app, was built in three months with just seven engineers (ref). Just like Google’s 20 Percent Time or Facebook’s Hackathons, companies can create space to innovate as part of their culture. This reduces the overhead and scrutiny while giving teams more freedom to try new things, which can eventually get funded and scale. 

Reward: What you celebrate is what you get. At Facebook, the story of a small, scrappy team changing the industry is part of the cultural lore. The origin story of many of the company’s most important products, from News Feed to Stories to Marketplace to Dating, started not from the top, but from a small group of people who thought of an idea and brought it to life. Innovation is celebrated and ingrained in how the company talks to employees about products and success. It is not about having the biggest team but making the biggest impact. Facebook celebrates people who build and iterate in new areas, even if it takes a while. That makes room for those who really want to take on a problem and lets them know that their work will be rewarded. 

Technology: Iteration speed is equal to learning speed. The best ground for innovation is one where the technology is already built so that any small team can build a prototype in a short period of time. The Facebook Marketplace tab, for instance, went from idea to shipping to several cities in two months. It was rolled out to five countries six months later, and 30 more countries less than a year after that. This is an example of why the base framework is so important. When your systems are not set up for iteration, every shot is precious and expensive. But if you can take five shots in the time it takes someone else to take one, you can shoot, readjust, shoot again, and continue until you get it on target. Teams with iteration speed have the advantage because they can iterate and learn quickly enough to pivot as needed.

How Innovation is Stifled