Answers Within

Emergent Innovation in Nonprofit Organizations
Gary Oster
This article provided by the Engstrom Institute

Changing Organizational Landscapes

Every modern organization confronts the necessity of change. Whether forced by the current global economic downturn, increased competition, a declining historical organizational model, technological shifts, or potential new clientele, organizations know innovation is essential for their viability. As Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Anthony Davila noted, the only reliable security an organization can possess is their "ability to innovate better and longer than competitors." Because limits to internal efficiency may have been reached, organizations realize that getting "better" remains important, but getting "different" is a matter of organizational life and death.

Leadership may have unintentionally overlooked a powerful source of fresh, innovative ideas: the organization's employees. Most innovation programs impose foreign innovation processes, often guided by external expert consultants or academics. Leaders should instead consider emergent innovation, a new low-risk innovation paradigm. Emergent innovation assumes that, regardless of how small or seemingly insignificant, the heartbeat of innovation is already alive and at work somewhere in the organization. Emergent innovation is "emergent" because of an intentional process to seek out, recognize, and promote "underground" innovation methodologies already successfully at work. In contrast to massive organization change expected from traditional innovation techniques, emergent innovation seeks to uncover and extend "small wins" that may develop momentum and beget additional innovation success.

Who Are The Underground Innovators?

An "underground innovator" is any employee who quickly and quietly develops products, services, ideas, processes, or environments informally and outside of regular organization channels, without the knowledge or permission of appropriate authorities. In colloquial terms, they exist and work "off-radar." The work of underground innovators fulfills practical customer needs but features a physical or performance level below normal company standards. Underground innovators typically appropriate insignificant quantities of the organization's resources in their efforts, making them impervious to economic downturns. MIT's Nicholas Negroponte said, "The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas. Usually this ability resides in people with very wide backgrounds, multidisciplinary minds, and a broad spectrum of experiences." These mavericks are highly inclusive, even discreetly seeking the advice and skills of experts within or outside of the company. Underground innovators are adept at sidestepping traditional institutional rules and may skip entire stages of a standard organization innovation cycle.

Why Are Innovators Underground?

Underground innovators hide their innovation efforts when they work in an environment toxic to innovation. Innovators are forced underground by a number of circumstances:

Organizational Priorities—Underground innovators often fulfill customer requirements which may be far below existing organization hurdles for functionality, cost, quality, margins, or proven potential market size. Lofty organization financial hurdles often preclude regular departments from working on the projects of concern to the underground innovator, and the need for strict control by organizational leaders similarly sends innovators underground.

Organization Innovation Process—Approval for innovation projects in organizations is often lengthy, convoluted, and highly politicized. Rigid internal budget cycles often run eighteen to twenty-four months, excluding funding for all fast-track innovation. Underground innovators sometimes work on projects to be used in one department though they are assigned to a different area of the organization.

Speed & Format—The application process for organization support of new innovation projects often requires months to complete, whereas underground innovators may complete a project in weeks or days. At one public utility, whenever departmental personnel queried Information Technologies for programming assistance, IT employees would smugly reply, "Four years" (the length of their current backlog). A small group of employees quietly decided to take the software programming of handheld electronic devices into their own hands, working together to learn the software language during lunch breaks. Their efforts ultimately had major positive financial ramifications. Innovations devised by underground innovators may be developed in a non-traditional manner or result in a format substantially different from that usually produced by the organization, drawing immediate rejection. While organization innovation methods may require production of a single final product, underground innovators often rely on a steady stream of rough, intentionally incomplete prototypes to elicit further ideas from customers, an approach wrongly considered wasteful by organizational accounting professionals.

Tradition—Organizations are often only open to ideas from "certified" experts, usually from outside of the organization. The broader skills of employees are only called upon in dire emergency, so they happily use them "off-radar" instead. Innovation resistance is abetted by rewarding employees for their allegiance to the past of the organization and sanctioning any change from the historical trajectory. The organization structure typically has little support for those who question tradition, orthodoxy, and legacy strategies, yet Gary Hamel said that non-linear innovation requires organizations to "escape the shackles of precedent and imagine entirely novel solutions to customer needs." Author Scott Berkun noted that personal rejection has often been the reward for innovative people: "Big ideas in all fields endure dismissals, mockeries, and persecutions (for them and their creators) on their way to changing the world." Leaders must listen to those who upset organizational complacency and challenge the status quo. When the president of a highly conservative college finally welcomed the graphic design ideas of a heavily-tattooed purple-haired student assistant, the result was a highly-successful marketing campaign.

Personal "Fit"—Scholar Warren Bennis said organizational misfits are not difficult to discern: "If not out-and-out rebels, participants may lack traditional credentials or exist on the margins of their professions … are never insiders or organization types on the fast track: They are always on their own track." Innovative people are often accompanied by personal idiosyncrasies, a strong will, a touch of hubris, and a tendency to ignore or reject the organizational code. Canadian scholar Francis Horibe said, "The qualities that make for great innovation—passion, drive, out-of-the-box thinking—traditionally have been viewed as arrogance, unreasonableness, and uncompromising behavior by many peer employees and organizations," and cause for sanction.

Motivations for Underground Innovators to Surface

Why would underground innovators choose to expose themselves to the very people and pressures that drove them underground in the first place? Because they anticipate being rewarded with a clearer pathway for implementation of their innovations. Reasons innovators choose to reveal their innovation activities include:

Recognition—After laboring incognito for some time, underground innovators want the recognition, appreciation, and support of their peers and leadership. When a small church blanched at the proposed cost for a minor facility renovation, church members who were decorators, painters, handymen, and weekend painters instead stepped forward to design and complete a significant facility renovation which only cost the price of materials and recognition before the congregation. When it received a welcomed grant with surprisingly extensive reporting requirements, a social service agency was pleased to learn of and recognize the heretofore unknown accountancy skills possessed by one of its receptionists.

Cover—In order to receive cooperation and assistance from others in the organization, underground innovators need organization executives to publically endorse the innovative work and to signal that they expect others to do the same.

Resources—Underground innovators may brave exposure of their activities because it is the only way they may receive approval to dedicate more personal work hours to their innovation practices. Other visible resources that may be garnered only by surfacing include extended use of equipment, basic project funding, innovation-related travel, and additional staffing.

Expansion—Underground innovators desire the intellectual stimulation provided by innovation and the satisfaction of seeing their nascent ideas accepted, promoted, and scaled up. One public school system was surprised that their lowest-paid maintenance man was quietly completing highly-skilled construction projects in school facilities without being directed or compelled.

Leading Emergent Innovation

In all internal communications, senior officers must consistently and truthfully communicate to employees that innovation is critical to the success of the organization, and that they continuously embrace innovation in all organizational activities. Leaders must repudiate the "cult of the expert" and communicate that ideas from all employees are welcome.

A trusted intermediary person may be necessary to commence an informal non-judgmental conversation to ferret out what methods have worked for the underground innovator and the requirements to informally spread successful methods to other areas of the organization.

The strongest signal leadership can give employees to show that they support innovation is to informally provide resources. Making the process formal and efficient essentially kills it. As innovation experts William Taylor and Polly LaBarre asserted, "Innovation is a messy business; problems arise when business makes the work of innovation too neat and tidy." For innovation to be sustainable, workable methods discovered from successful underground innovators should be transmitted to all employees who wish to receive them, along with encouragement to innovate.

Rather that attempting innovation "homeruns," executives should encourage a consistently growing number of "small wins." Each of these small wins has a fragmentary character and is driven by opportunism and dynamically changing market situations. As Weick said, "A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals." Every organization needs to recognize, support, and emulate the actions of what Jerry Sternin and Robert Choo, officials of the organization Save the Children, called "positive deviants."

Organizational Benefits from Emergent Innovation

Emergent innovation promises numerous important benefits for the organization and its employees:

Organization Status Discovery—The emergent innovation process provides a new and unique perspective on organization activities. Signs of significant operational problems may be recognized for the first time as internal impedance to the efforts of the invisible innovator.

Systemic Innovation Change—Although emergent innovation most often occurs with products, the same techniques may be extended to other elements of the organization. As a comprehensive report by the Finnish Funding Agency on Technology and Innovation showed, innovation should be promoted in ten key areas: the business model, networking, enabling process, core process, product performance, product system, service, channel, brand, and customer experience.

Change Internal Innovation Ecosystem—By intentionally and systematically eliminating organizational barriers that forced initial innovation efforts underground, organization leadership can engender an environment that ultimately allows innovation to flourish. Changes in actions are preceded by changes in attitude: organizations must abandon the shackles of policy, tradition, and stale orthodoxies. Stanford Professor Robert Sutton noted that every organization "needs to be a place that generates many disparate ideas. It should be an arena, a constant and constructive contest, where the best ideas win." An organization culture must be developed that encourages idiosyncratic thinkers. British iconoclast James Dyson said, "You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. And if you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking that they have been taught to think." Unconventional ideas, small experiments and prototypes that sometimes fail and provide valuable learning to the organization, must be welcomed.

Capture and Utilize Organization Knowledge—Innovation requires institutional learning mechanisms that encourage fresh ideas to be recorded and disseminated to others in the organization. Stanley Gryskiewicz noted, "This means establishing mechanisms for finding new information and ushering it into the organization, and then putting that new information into the hands of the people who can best make sense of it." Regardless of position or tenure, those who have created or acquired knowledge must quickly and efficiently come to the attention of those who seek knowledge.

The Christian Imperative for Innovation

Christian leaders have an obligation to encourage employee innovation for one simple reason: it is ordained by God. Beyond the struggle for organizational viability, engaging in the act of innovation allows individuals a unique mechanism to experience and communicate with God. In The Message paraphrase of The Holy Bible, Paul told the Corinthians that everyone is given unique abilities to engage God through innovation: "Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people!" J. P. Moreland of Biola University asserts that, for Christians, faith influences every aspect of their lives: "To live Christianity is to allow Jesus Christ to be the Lord of every aspect of my life. There is no room for a secular/sacred separation in the life of Jesus' followers." Scholar Robert Grudin said, "The thrill conveyed by inspiration in any field is perhaps best described as coming from a sense of participation in beauty, a momentary unity between a perceived beauty of experience and a perceiving beauty of mind." Pope John Paul II similarly noted that, through our own innovative efforts, we find a special way to connect with our creator: "All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardor of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendor which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit. Believers find nothing strange in this: they know that they have had a momentary glimpse of the abyss of light which has its original wellspring in God." Innovation may be redemptive: Scripture and the personal experience of Christians worldwide show that God uses innovation for humans to know more of Him, to communicate with Him, and to ultimately accomplish His earthly will for mankind. An important role of leaders is to support the innovative efforts of their charges.

Conclusion

Innovation is an important factor in the success of all organizations, and God has given all people the ability and purpose for engaging in innovation. The imposition of foreign innovation processes on employees rarely achieves intended results. Every organization has successful innovators driven underground by organizational impedance. Through trusted intermediaries, the organization may be informed about the innovation methodologies of its existing underground innovators, which function as prototypes for larger, positive systemic change. The new paradigm of emergent innovation is an important mechanism to help organizations thrive in the remarkably turbulent global environment.

Dr. Gary Oster is Associate Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship in the Regent University School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship (GLE). Before his tenure at GLE he served for more than two years as Associate Dean for Academics in the Regent University School of Undergraduate Studies and a decade in senior administrative roles at William Tyndale College. Dr. Oster has served as a classroom and online instructor since 1994. Prior to his academic endeavors, he was an executive in high-technology corporations, both domestically and overseas, focusing primarily upon the computer, electronics, and automotive industries.