Creating a Culture of Innovation: Design an Optimal Environment to Create and Execute New Ideas

By Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

Deconstruct the history of patterns of innovation in business and connect them to existing and failed attempts in management consultancies, engineering, web technologies and academic institutions. This book shows you how to create an optimal environment at work for growth and innovation.

Many large-scale organizations eventually invest in research and innovation as a dedicated part of their businesses. In doing so, they are faced with two choices: build their own practice of innovation or enact patterns of innovation created before them, ones they perceived as "tried and tested." In this book, you will see how patterns of innovation touch many aspects of a worker’s life: from how their work is presented to others, job titles, working environment, and expectations around output. Every chapter will offer a history of these patterns and examples of how they have succeeded and failed within organizations. 

What You Will Learn

• Identify how innovation is named and highlighted in organizations
• Reveal ways to champion innovation to clients and the outside world, from trade shows and conferences inside the office
• Uncover ways companies acquire innovation, including incubators or mergers
• Discover the conditions for innovation to happen every day, including office layouts, time management, communication structures, and expectation management

Who This Book Is For

Tech start-up/scale-up founders, management consultants, managing directors, innovation managers and heads of R&D, academic researchers, interior designers, and architects

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apress
• Release date: Dec 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781484262917

Book preview

© Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino 2020

A. Deschamps-SonsinoCreating a Culture of Innovationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6291-7_1

1. Space and Tools

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino¹  

(1)

London, UK

Business can invade any architecture.

—Jenny Kuo¹

In 2012, the editor of Monocle magazine, the illustrious Tyler Brulé, was invited to write about office spaces for the Financial Times in his regular column.² What he had to say is a great starting point:

For a sector that fancies itself as creative it’s remarkable how many companies fall for the same design clichés […]. There’ll be skate ramps in reception, kray-zee furniture for otherwise dignified people to fall off while they wait to be collected by interns carrying massive Thermoses of lukewarm coffee, and there’s a good chance there’ll be lurid green AstroTurf underfoot. Beyond reception there’ll be basketball hoops, jogging lanes and tennis boundaries painted on the floor, along one wall will be a bunch of plush animal heads mounted, trophy-style, there’ll be lots of eating stations where people will be filling up their 500 litre Thermoses with various free beverages and, as you weave your way past half-finished walls made out of particle board, you’ll pass lots of young men who’ll never glance at you but will fist-bump their colleagues and shout yo man when they pass along the kooky zigzag corridor.

This in short is the conundrum of any business. Appear too kooky and you risk losing face. Look too traditional and people may not believe you’re up to anything worthy of mention. How a business appears to guests on the outside can equally become a psychological crutch for managers of innovation. Proof that something, anything, is happening. But the role of physical space, interiors, and what is left after a meeting has the power to set the tone for how new ideas are born as well as making sure those ideas don’t disappear into thin air. How work environments affect the ability to stop and think, to come up with ideas, to make these ideas become more than ideas but projects that find support, enthusiasm, and funding is important to understand.

To consider space is not only to consider how that team actually operates but also how it is perceived by the rest of the business. The spatial decisions an innovation manager makes may impact how innovation work is done and how that work makes its way over the wall to the rest of the business.

A decision about spaces for innovation is, in fact, a decision about power and permissions, two important elements of a culture of innovation. In his seminal book Buildings and Power, Thomas Markus describes the impact that architecture has in shaping power:³

Power has to do ultimately with resources, since these are finite, the only freedom is to divide them in different propositions. It is the cake slicing operation, more here is less there […]. Its results are seen in hierarchical structures, control, surveillance, decision processes […]. In the design and use of buildings, power can be evenly distributed or concentrated so as to create great asymmetries.

The power a team has to act on its agenda of innovation will shape and be shaped by the space that team is in. This is what Umberto Eco refers to as the semiotics in spaces or social utility.⁴ A space has the power to signal to the rest of a business that the work done within it is executed differently and should be treated differently.

Equally, there may be unintended negative consequences to a series of spatial decisions. These might signal to the rest of the business that the conditions in an innovation space are disconnected from business as usual and therefore not worthy of their attention. Worse yet, an innovation space might be used for purposes other than innovation work simply because it looks different to anything else in the business. It’s important to understand and identify these dynamics early on, even before a space is assigned or designed.

Elements which a business leader will have to consider when thinking about the space where innovation work happens include the following:

The resources immediately available to that team

The amount of space given to the team

The amount of space given to individuals vs. group work

The amount of social space for that team

How that team’s space physically connects to the spaces occupied by other teams

How that team’s space differs from other team’s spaces

Making decisions about each and every one of these elements means shaping an experience for a team and impacting the culture of the entire business as a result.

This chapter will not dictate rules around how spaces should be designed, but will instead describe the power of space in shaping the experience of innovation work and provide a list of consideration for anyone excited by the prospect of carving out a dedicated space in their business.

Interior design

Interior design is one of the few tools still left for business leaders to signal to their clients, partners, and employees a distinct identity, brand, and work culture. Over the last 20 years, however, the modern workplace has become more homogenized.

Walk into the offices of a communications company, a newspaper, or a bank and there is almost nothing to differentiate them apart from their interiors. Most of their employees are using the same tools: smart phones, a desktop computer, or a laptop. Clean desk policies, coworking, remote working, and hot desking practices also have contributed to making work feel increasingly generic as people come and go in spaces that are largely the same, never really having the chance to leave their mark. Work happens in a space, barely touching it, with nothing lingering around. People become what artist James Bridle calls ghost renders:⁵ moving bodies with no impact on their immediate surroundings and a very diffuse sense of when work starts and stops. As the architect Jeannette Kuo describes in her book A-Typical Plan:

New terms such as playbour, enterprise gamification and hackathons suggest a general ‘ludification’ of work, the merging of leisure and obligation. The worksphere has become one but social playground, its players, a hybrid troupe of nomadic urbanites—dressed up with a menagerie of technologies. Much like magicians and con artists, we juggle our hybrid devices as they get faster and more ubiquitous, while roaming from hotspot to hotspot. Home has become less home, and the office as type has vanished.⁶

In this de-physicalized work atmosphere, interior design physicalizes the values and future direction of a business. Investing in interiors becomes a strategy to set ground rules about what it means to work there.

This will naturally have repercussions on how a business will then think about the look and feel of their innovation work and what looks and feels legitimate. Legitimacy is largely built on looking at a competitor’s work environment and saying I’d like that too instead of looking at how people work within those spaces and then shaping a space to suit a way of working or a way of thinking both on an individual staff level and collectively. Some of this competitive reaction will be explored in Chapter 4.

Space isn’t the only contributor to innovation work as Franklin Becker, of Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, observed:

[Google, Apple, Cisco or Facebook] were very innovative long before they’d built any of their new work environments on their campuses. It’s clearly not the case that they only became creative and innovative after they built these environments. […] I personally don’t believe that the environments themselves are what inspires creativity, I think it is more about the organisation and more fundamentally about the hiring of people. And it is about how those teams are organised and work together.⁷

So work interiors have the capacity to either support existing innovation work or perhaps even disrupt it. Understanding the risks of either overthinking things or ignoring them becomes important.

In the next section, we’ll examine two types of office layouts, cloisters, and open plan , to see how they relate to innovation work. These architectural typologies have historical links to invention, research, and innovation work in large businesses.

By exploring this history, we can also highlight human dynamics which are rendered invisible or have recently digitized.

The cloisters of RAND

The RAND Corporation was a private, independent, nonprofit organization spun out of the United States Air Force in 1948. It was responsible for many early innovations in the fields of social sciences, cybernetics, and warfare. Concepts like mutually assured destruction, war games, games theory, distributed networks, and systems thinking were all developed at RAND. Described as a "civilian campus, a university without students,⁸" 300 people worked in its Santa Monica building. This association with traditional education in a context of world-leading military innovation isn’t surprising as most of the researchers had graduated from university degrees or worked in university-led research for the Air Force. A culture of individually led doctoral studies, aligned to a collective challenge, was to shape their workplace deeply.

By the early 1950s, RAND needed a new headquarters to bring together the engineers, social science researchers, and academic partners that were scattered across California. It became obvious to RAND’s leaders that real breakthroughs would come from enabling proximity and cross-sector collaboration between them in a setting that was less formal. A focus on propinquity and the concept of mixed teams was at the heart of the design of a new building. But they did not hand over a brief to an architecture or interior design firm. Instead, one of RAND’s early employees and head of the mathematics department John Davis Williams delved into architectural types eventually choosing a lattice pattern. He went as far as suggesting the maximum distance between teams (26 feet). Williams described the focus on proximity of these mixed teams as the only way to develop such a tender thing as an idea.⁹ In an internal memo, Williams explains the reasoning behind a new office and the characteristics of a desirable office:

Why are we building a building? Aside from some intangibles, such as a feeling of and a look of performance, that it would give us, the motivation must come from some or all of the following:

1. better location;

2. a better organized facility;

3. better space for individuals.[...]

I believe that the qualities that are more desired are, approximately in the order of importance:

1. privacy;

2. quiet;

3. natural light;

4. natural air;

5. spaciousness.

This memo was handed over to the architect Roy H. Kelly who translated it into a physical lattice with courtyards or patios. N icknamed the waffle building, it was completed in 1953 (Figure 1-1).

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Figure 1-1

RAND office as seen from above with courtyards and the lattice or waffle layout (courtesy of Santa Monica Public Library Image Archives)

The building process is described in detail in Michael Kubo’s excellent thesis Constructing the Cold War Environment: The Strategic Architecture of RAND. Kubo’s book gives us an overview of what the office was like once completed: each researcher had their own office with large windows they could open and the doors would be kept open most of the time helping naturally ventilate the whole building. Private meetings were held in these offices (Figure 1-2), reducing the need for dedicated meeting or conference rooms. The patios (Figure 1-3) offered an opportunity to socialize, have lunch, and take in some Californian sun.

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Figure 1-2

The office of programmer Stuart Dreyfus at RAND

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Figure 1-3

Internal patio at RAND with staffers playing ping pong (courtesy of Santa Monica Public Library Image Archives)

Both the proximity to one’s colleagues and the ability to work quietly emulate the tradition of European cloistered abbeys. It also mirrored an open approach to information access and trust in personnel. The prevailing spirit was best described in the 1957 welcome manual of RAND:¹⁰

The fewer controls the better, we think, and the more each individual acts on his own responsibility the better. Maybe one reason why this atmosphere prevails is that RAND’s work calls for originality and initiative; our products are ideas, and neither ideas nor the ways of producing them fit into repeating