Innovation & Culture: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Innovation doesn't live in a department, it finds home in your culture.
By Aishani Gupta, Sr. Consultant @ Thoughtium
Published October 2022
About 10 years ago, in a small city in Punjab in India, it became all the rage to use cheap, locally manufactured washing machines doubled up as churners of lassi. Many shops in the city were too tiny to accommodate washing machines, so fueled by the signature Indian “jugaad” innovation approach, the shopkeepers took a table fan shaft, modified it and added blades to make portable blenders.
That idea of patching something together in a very makeshift way to get a result you want is common in India. And there’s one word in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi that sums it up: jugaad. The word 'jugaad', also touted as “a new growth formula for Corporate America” by an HBR article, is described as an improvised or makeshift solution using scarce resources. It's a way of life in India, where washing machines are used for whipping up yogurt drinks. Ultimately there’s no real word in English that captures the essence of jugaad. Creative resourcefulness is the best way to define the word. Often doing more with less, creative thinking is at the heart of jugaad—or one can say at the heart of innovation.
I am the daughter and granddaughter of a household that has served multiple generations in the Indian Army. Identity has many different facets, and being Indian and a child of the armed forces are two big facets of my identity. As a result of this, the aspects of my personality that have particularly high resonance are my agility and resilience in my approach to things—finding ways to make something possible, and being relentless in doing so. Be it bouncing from one city to another, moving to a new country, pivoting on a project at work, or making a vision possible with entrepreneurs—it’s all about possibilities. Growing up in a culture that forced me to be resourceful, for the very lack of available resources, openness to change and creative resourcefulness became a part of my DNA. And that’s where I began to redefine creativity itself.
Watch the series
Tune in to conversations centered on ways to build innovation capabilities.
That creative resourcefulness has continued to grow with me through the years. With a background in design thinking and strategic planning, I’m constantly drawn into the innovation space. Let’s explore three key themes I’ve found to be true in building a culture of innovation:
Culture enables the innovation mindset.
I had the opportunity to work with this well funded, high growth startup. We had a company Trello board that served as an idea repository. ANYONE in the company could post an interesting idea to pursue for the business, and ANYONE in the company could pick an idea from the board and choose to be the sponsor. We called this the “Idea Library.”
People designed small scale pilots to test their ideas and shared their learnings—of both failures and successes—with the broader team in a weekly call. If something worked really well, it almost organically was scaled across the organization. We saw many failed initiatives but also some huge successes, where the impact of the successes outweighed the cost of the failures.
One such initiative was where I had the opportunity to create and run a small community of women entrepreneurs. It took us a while to get the engagement right but the openness to new initiatives and the space for making pivots when needed, actually gave birth to one of the most impactful women entrepreneur communities in India. A top tech giant noticed the success and took the decision to launch their program for entrepreneurs in India in partnership with this initiative—a reminder, this began as a small side project where I dedicated less than 10% of my time to the project.
What I loved about the company and the founders was the fact that this high growth startup, where numbers and revenue were critical to prove success to our big investors, still made space to encourage its team to experiment and try new things. We were encouraged to try and fail. While we’ve seen how a culture of resourcefulness in India gives life to innovation, this was an example of practicing intentionality in making space for innovation.
fostering innovation:
A toolkit
This toolkit walks you through practices to help you foster an innovative spirit and mindset in yourself and with your team.
Diversity strengthens your innovation capabilities.
The universe is diverse by its own nature. Even humans differ from one another. We have various differences among ourselves, including diverse languages, sexes, faiths, cultures, eating preferences, and IQ levels. The list goes on and on. And there is harmony in contrast. Only a collaborative environment is conducive to innovation. So, when there is harmony in diversity, innovation flourishes.
Moving around and living amidst different cultures—as diverse as it gets in India—furthered my personal understanding of the word “possibilities.” Interacting with people from different cultures helps develop perspectives and forces you to experience many more ways of doing something—the many ways of making a roti, the many ways of combating floods, the many ways of coping with the heat wave—experiencing diversity enriches your perspective on problem solving.
Innovation is enabled by diversity; not just diversity of ethnicity, race and lived experiences, but also the diversity of hard functional skills, and individual preferences: are you an extrovert or introvert? Are you an ideator or an operator? Are you a linear thinker or an exponential thinker?
Each person has a place in the innovation process and knowing where to seat them at the innovation table is the key to bringing ideas to the fore and scaling them.
This is something we often see the large innovation and design firms leverage. Their teams are always a mix of diverse functional strengths—the team could have a business analyst, a graphic designer and a filmmaker work together to solve a client problem. Because that combined perspective is powerful. The breadth of knowledge and skills informs the problem solving and solution design.
Celebrate the diversity of opinions, perspectives, skills, and function in your teams and be intentional in bringing in individuals that are different from you, to feed ideation and run successful execution.
Develop and reward behaviors that support innovation.
In order for people to think outside the box and creatively, they need to feel comfortable with sharing and voicing their ideas without the fear of ridicule or failure. Creating an environment of psychological safety allows space for your team members to share their ideas and also act on them without any fear. It encourages interpersonal risk taking, a crucial element to embrace failure for innovation. Encouraging and enabling your team to take risks is critical to the success of innovation. Traits such as agility and resilience support the “fail forward” culture that is imperative to innovation growth at an organization. It urges us to rephrase “failure” as a “learning opportunity”.
Thoughtium has many ways through which we help foster the “fail forward” and “fail fast” culture. This includes rethinking metrics that could be inhibiting innovation growth and reframing them to help encourage innovation instead; helping leaders express vulnerability and speak about failures as their opportunities for learning that then helps their teams experiment, fail, succeed and share without embarrassment, which focuses on the process of learning instead; identifying each individual team member’s personal strengths and preferences, and helping to extend these into areas of becoming more agile and resilient.
These processes not only create a deeper sense of who we are as individuals but also help decode the value the other person brings to the table. Developing skills to better understand and work with others.
There are many types of innovation, and many ways of need-gap solutioning, however if there is one thing I want you to take away from this article, it’s that innovation is a way of working that is embedded in your culture. Your culture encourages, enables and exonerates innovation. Review how you welcome ideas, how you take risks, and how you recognize and pivot from failures. Innovation doesn't live in a department, it finds home in your culture.
explore more thoughtium perspectives topics
