We found that many chief executives were doing some of the things that encourage innovative working across an organisation, but that few had a comprehensive and systematic approach to fostering innovation.

How were chief executives encouraging innovation?

Most chief executives were optimistic and positive about the future.  They had all consulted local residents about future priorities and supported politicians in agreeing their councils’ ambitions.   Most had identified the major areas for radical innovations. Many had been striving to get the ‘right people’ in their top teams.   Many talked passionately about the importance of honest, two-way communication (with employees, service users, residents and partners). All were conscious of the importance of employee morale, and the challenge of maintaining it given jobs losses and other major changes. And most were encouraging managers and employees to think about how they might ‘do things differently’. All were engaged in a range of cross-organisational and cross-boundary initiatives. And most had systematic ways of driving and tracking progress, to deliver new initiatives–with many highlighting the importance of their programme and project management systems in turning ideas into reality.

So what more might they do?

Not all chief executives were:

• Developing explicit politically supported policies on managing risk, including a no blame approach to intelligent failures.
• Working on getting the pace of innovation right, including creating as many positive moments as possible.
• Ensuring that their managers had a deep understanding of their services users’ aspirations and priorities.
• Deliberately attracting, retaining and making the most of employees with the skills and attitudes required to implement innovations.
• Working with unusual partners, such as people from the creative sector.
• Ensuring that organisational practices encouraged innovation.
• Safeguarding time for reflection and creative thinking.
• Recognising, rewarding and celebrating innovations.

And very few were:

• Ensuring that a major proportion of top team (politicians and senior managers) time and effort was focussed on achieving major innovations.
• Putting innovation processes in place, appropriate to each service.
• Ensuring that managers successfully operated these processes.
• Protecting those working on radical innovations from day to day work and organisational pressures.
• Involving ‘leading’ service users and front line staff in innovation processes.
• Looking at new places for fresh ideas, e.g. the creative sector, the private sector, other countries.
• Employing sufficient people with expertise in: a) innovation processes and b) the opportunities provided by latest new technology and social media.

Taking a comprehensive approach

To capture the key actions chief executives can take to support and accelerate innovation, we’ve created a ‘Local Council’s Innovation Framework’: http://creativity.city.ac.uk/accelerating_local_govt_innov.html.  The current Framework is a draft, so please let us know what you think of it by 28^th February 2012.  Post your comments below or email them to: joan.munro.1@city.ac.uk

What next

In late March, having reviewed your comments, we will issue a revised version of the Framework.    Under each of the factors, we will be adding quotes from chief executives as well as examples of the actions they are taking.  We will also create an anonymous electronic benchmarking tool, so that chief executives can compare their scores against different aspects of the Framework.

We will be using the Framework as the basis for more detailed research with frontline staff in two or three councils.  If you would like more information about what this please email: joan.munro.1@city.ac.uk or ring: 0779 2952 498.

However, these same commentators often ignore that creativity is not free. Indeed, many reported creative processes and techniques themselves consume resources – resources that organizations just don’t have. This poses a challenge – how to be creative with less. We need creativity on a shoestring.

I’ve been working with City graduate Bianca Hollis of BBC worldwide to design and evaluate creativity on a shoestring. Bianca is a user experience designer developing digital products such as web sites and software apps. Like many working in digital media, she uses agile methods to design these products. Agile methods encourage the iterative development of working software, often in two-week cycles. This leaves little time for creative thinking – who really wants to think divergently when the next software release is expected in 10 working days?

So our challenge was to fit creativity techniques into agile in creativity workshops that rarely last more than 45 minutes in agile projects at BBC Worldwide. We gave stakeholders techniques such as hall of fame, constraint removal and back to the future to generate ideas for new BBC products. Moreover, I think that we succeeded. The workshops generated lots of ideas that were rated significantly more novel than existing ideas in the project backlog.

We were sufficiently excited by these successes to take the shoestring creativity techniques on the road. This week we ran a tutorial at OOP2012 in Munich, teaching quick creativity techniques to agile software developers. The techniques were a success. People’s reactions revealed that we’ve hit a nerve. Creativity on a shoestring is needed more than ever.

So let’s be smart. Create more from less.

We recently visited the Royal Academy’s current exhibition on Edgar Degas, the 19th century impressionist painter famous for his studies of ballerinas and for inventing bold, new approaches to depict them. But you might be surprised, like us, to learn that he was a ‘techie’ and that the latest advances in imaging technology inspired his work and his creative process.

In the second half of the 19th century the pioneers of photography were experimenting with new applications of the medium and new techniques for making images.

The technique of ‘photosculpture’ was developed in the 1860s. A model was positioned at the centre of a circle of cameras and their image was captured from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. The photographs were transferred to clay blocks and used to create a three dimensional sculpture of the person.

Degas adopted this approach and adapted it to suit him. Posing a ballerina and asking her not to move, he progressed around her, sketching her from every angle. Degas made more than 20 sketches of one model and used them to create his famous sculpture ‘Little Dancer Aged Fourteen’. This approach was radically different from the common artistic practise of the time, where the artist remained in one place and asked the model to change poses.

In the 1870s and 80s photographers developed high speed imaging techniques that allowed them to freeze movement. They photographed moving animals and people using multiple cameras to make a series of still images, each one like a single frame from a movie.

Degas studied their images and made drawings from their photographs of horses, nudes and dancers. He incorporated these starting points into some of his most famous paintings, pastels and wax models. His works from that period often show ongoing movement, for example a series of ballet steps.

In the 1870s Degas created a number of long, narrow paintings of ballet classes. This format invites the eye to move from one end of the painting to the other, creating a dynamic visual experience. At the same time photographers were developing panoramic photography. Their cameras used long, narrow glass negatives that moved slowly behind the lens. The image was created gradually as the light moved across the surface. Degas’s paintings are of the same size and proportions as the panoramic photographs of the time. The way we scan across a Degas painting to understand the image emulates the progress of the lens across the glass negative. Degas may have been inspired by early panoramic photographs.

Which got us thinking – if Degas were alive today – what would he be doing? One possibility is that he would be lead animator at Pixar, finding new ways to depict movement in more realistic and challenging ways. Such crystal ball gazing focuses our minds on the complex dependencies between science and art through the ages – dependencies that inform creative thinking.

How are new developments in science and technology influencing your creativity today?

This blog was inspired by the ‘Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement’ exhibition at the Royal Academy, London. http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/degas/

Photo courtesy of Kristin Myers Harvey  http://www.flickr.com/photos/designministry/158117949/sizes/l/in/photostream/

During the break, I read ‘The Shift’ by Lynda Gratton and I consider my fellow MICLers and staff to be what Lynda refers to as my Big Ideas Crowd.  I expect that some will become my Posse – my small circle of trusted people who will be there for me in the future as a sounding board.

We’re an eclectic bunch and boy do we create a Hotspot…

Serendipity is considered a ‘happy accident’. A fortunate discovery that you did not expect to make. I’m rather fond of serendipity. Many of what I consider the best things that have happened in my life, I put down to serendipity. Meeting my husband is one. My current job is another. Life is full of these moments.

The idea of artificially creating the conditions for it however, seems impossible. How do you know which conditions, events or actions will lead to a happy accident? If I think about the things that I attribute to serendipity there are few common factors. The big one they do all have in common is that I was open to the opportunities that arose unexpectedly.

Creativity is like that. The connections we make when trying to creatively solve a problem is often serendipitous. A combination of several ideas coming together to form a new and surprising idea. We’re only able to make these connections, if we’re open to the potential outcomes. We can facilitate the conditions for which creativity can happen. So perhaps the idea that we can facilitate serendipitous outcomes might not be quite so farfetched after all?

What’s your take on it?