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[Article published in In the Review]
How
do you foster a culture of innovation within a business, and how do you
tell a good idea from a bad one? Gemalto investigates the art of
creativity.
The most common question anyone ever asks writers is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Some authors resent the implication that there is a pot of ideas somewhere that anyone could exploit successfully, if only someone would disclose its secret location. The reality is, as British author Douglas Adams wrote in the introduction to the collected radio scripts for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, that “an idea is only an idea”. A whole script is “hundreds of ideas”, all of which have to be painfully invented.
Companies have the same problem. What is creativity, and how do you go about fostering it? Adams’ own answer is applicable to many types of situation: “The way you get really good ideas is by working with talented people you have fun with.”
“You can debate whether creativity can be codified and taught,” says John Shen, who runs the four-year-old Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Based on his previous experiences working at Intel and teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, he says: “My personal view is no, it can’t be taught and you can’t systematize it.” But, he adds, “I see it as my job to create an environment that can foster greater creativity.”
 Random connections
 In Shen’s view, a key element is to allow innovative ideas to emerge from the bottom up. |
 Execution is key
Companies sometimes struggle to exploit the ideas that emerge from their research divisions. |
 Missed opportunities
Juels goes on to raise a point that many experts in innovation agree on: the processes by which grants are awarded and papers are accepted for technical journals tend to filter out ‘outliers’ |
 The middle ground
As Chief Innovation and Technology Officer for Gemalto, Tan Teck Lee handles this same issue by asking his teams to focus on both “current and adjacent businesses”. |
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John Shen (Nokia), Ari Juels (RSA) and Tan Teck Lee (Gemalto) share their views on creativity with us.
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