We are esteemed to announce that Oxford Seed Fund has chosen to invest in Go1. The announcement will see one of the most prestigious schools in the world supporting the future of the learning industry, and working to make learning more accessible to everyone across the world.

The press release from Oxford reads and follows:

The Seed Fund team at Saïd Business School, Oxford is delighted to announce its latest investment. The team has chosen to invest in Go1, an e-learning management system for businesses, governments and universities.

Go1 provides organizations with a simple and effective software platform for training their staff, students, volunteers and other affiliates. Organizations can easily customize their training and development programs, and add features such as videos, chat rooms, forums and quizzes. In this way, they can provide user-friendly building-blocks that help transform existing, outdated software or paper-based training systems into sophisticated training platforms that can be used on both desktop and mobile devices.

Go1 was accepted into the prestigious Y-Combinator startup incubator program in Mountain View, California for Summer 2015. The company also recently secured a contract with Oxford University to provide bolt-on services to its WebLearn platform for students. The company launched in Australia two years ago, and the four founders are all in their twenties. One of the founders Andrew Barnes, is a Rhodes Scholar and a PhD candidate in business management, who completed his MSc at Oxford in 2015.  Chris Hood has a computer science background and leads the internal development team, Vu Tran has just completed his medical training and heads the sales team and Chris Eigeland has a legal background and has extensive experience in running and growing teams.

Scott Kincaid, co-chair of the Oxford Seed Fund for 2015 said:

“Go1 has an amazing team with an impressive combination of talent, experience, work ethic and vision. The company has built an extraordinary product, and has already gained significant traction with many notable customers. The challenge for the team will be to scale into new countries including the United States, while continuing to innovate its product offering. Go1 is entering a large and growing market that is ripe for disruption, and the SBS Seed Fund team is confident that Andrew and his team are more than capable of being the ones to reinvent this space.”

“We are excited to welcome the University of Oxford on board through the Oxford Seed Fund’s investment in Go1.  Oxford has a long and famous history. But what is exciting is the future of education, both within a traditional university environment and in other contexts. We are thrilled that the University is looking towards the future of education, and investing in a business like Go1 that is focused on leveraging technology to support education and training.”

You can also read about Oxford University investing in Go1 in The Australian.

The Oxford Seed Fund is a student-run fund that invests £15-25k in early-stage ventures founded by Oxford students and alumni. It provides funding and support to entrepreneurs, and it is part of the Entrepreneurship Centre at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

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Welcome to Part 5 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In the final part of our master class series with Steve we are taking a look into why startups and new business are critical. Due to the mining industry boom starting to draw to a close, it's now time to refocus Australia in a new direction. By shifting the focus onto high intellectual property industries, better known as tech startups, we can create a huge export industry whilst retaining our talent in Australia, and creating a better economy for everyone.

Steve Baxter Master Class - Part 5: Why Startups and New Businesses are Critical

"Why do I think startups and new business innovation is Australia is critical? Well, we have been a fantastic nation and had an amazing run of success over the past 25 years, specifically driven from the mining and resource industry. That party is over. In some respects we have been actually left quite disadvantaged from it, we've actually ramped up the cost of our society through wages and the cost of construction and everything else goes up. All of the big construction projects go away, and the wages stay high be the people  lose their job, and we're left with quite a small chain of royalties coming in. 

So we need to re orientate or refocus our country away from low productivity industries such as mining and the resource industry to the high intellectual property dense industries such as high growth capital potential companies, sometimes called tech startups. They are about 95% export if we get them right. I believe, In the Atlasssian documentation release last week they say that 90% of the revenue comes from outside of Australia, but about 70% of the workforce is inside Australia. If we can get this right it can be an all export industry and there will be a lot of people earning a lot of money which would be fantastic." 

Another interesting look at getting a new business off the ground comes from Bill Gross. Bill has founded a lot of startups, and incubated many others — and he got curious about why some succeeded and others failed. So he gathered data from hundreds of companies, his own and other people's, and ranked each company on five key factors. He found one factor that stands out from the others and shared them with us.

Bill Gross has founded a lot of start-ups, and incubated many others -- and he got curious about why some succeeded and others failed. So he gathered data from hundreds of companies, his own and other people's, and ranked each company on five key factors. He found one factor that stands out from the others -- and surprised even him.

Bill Gross: The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed

This has been the final part of our Steve Baxter Master Class. We hope you've enjoyed the series, and just in case you missed any episodes, you can catch up on them all here:

Part 1: Why ongoing learning is Important

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 5: why startups and new businesses are critical

There are so many amazing things happening in the startup world in Australia at the moment, and everyone has an interesting story to tell. Recently, Chris Titley of Morgans in Brisbane, launched a new podcast called 'Morgans Startup Series' to find out more about local startups and to educate his listeners on all the great things people are working on.

Go1 CEO Andrew Barnes was recently invited down to have a chat to Chris about all things Go1 and startups.

"Andrew and I discussed the company and their global vision, as well as topics such as funding, accelerators and the importance of strategic investors such as Steve Baxter who has been instrumental in assisting the company to grow."

You can listen to the full episode below.


Go1 featured on Morgans Startup Series podcast

Welcome to Part 4 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In this part of our master class Steve is going to be talking about the state of tech in Australia. With a recent change in of Prime Minister, we are already starting to see a new government looking to give our fast growing tech industry a big boost. Steve talks to us about some new policies that will have a big impact on the local innovation sector, how to make the most of utilizing government programs, revising the Australian visa system to get more skilled workers into the country, and changes to tax plans that will benefit startups.

"I'm particularly excited at the moment with the way Australia is going in the innovation space. We've got a fresh new Prime Minister, we've got a bit of a change going in ministry as well. All of a sudden we can talk openly about innovation and there's a lot of potential in this country that we're going to start to utilize more and hopefully we're going to see more Go1's and other companies absolutely kicking it out of the park and becoming global success stories.

We need lots of policy changes in Australia. One I was working on over the weekend was the NEIS Scheme. A lot of people roll their eyes when I say this but NEIS is something call New Enterprise Incentives Scheme, and it's actually a really good scheme give people who start traditional businesses, hairdressers, mower shops, all the rest of it, 39 weeks new start goal, whilst they're actually starting the business, and the income of the business doesn't count against that income support. People do use it for startups, it's actually just quite hard to do that, it's not obvious and you've actually just got to sort of close your eyes and bend to the left a bit to shape it towards a tech startup. So we're working with the government to hopefully take that and make that more available to tech startups so people can actually use it through accelerator programs. so if you've been accepted to an accelerator program, like Go1 was, you can also get 39 weeks of income support along the way. While it's not good for all businesses, it's actually helping people to move from one part of their life to another. So that one is particularly interesting at the moment.

I think we need to need to take care of our visas at the moment, our 457 visas. We need  default accept as opposed to a default deny when it comes to the appropriate skill of people on a 457 visa. I had a great idea, it's not actually my idea it's Mike Honeybrook's from about 4 weeks ago, he said that we should just look at anyone with the appropriate degree from say one of the top 500 universities in the world and if they've got it, we should tick it and let them in for 2, 5, 6 years or whatever the time is. That's not a bad basis to start from. I like getting the supply of people, along with the supply of skills which is quite important. 

I also like some of the tax plans that are around at the moment, and those tax plans and those plans are all around giving early stage investors the same capital gains tax relief that larger investors get. Right now there's a scheme where by if you have $10 million dollar to invest in certain areas, you can actually get capital gains tax exempt as well. If it's worth while, why not make it for anyone investing in one of those earlier stage companies eligible for capital gains tax exception. Lets face it, probably 1 in 10 actually work anyway so it's not like we're losing a great deal. A lot is going on in the politics space, and i'm really happy to see it being discussed at the moment." 

Recently there was also a great panel discussion at TEDxSydney discussing the challenges and opportunities around entrepreneurship and startups in Australia featuring Dr Russel J Howard, Scientist, CEO and Entrepreneur, Professor Tony Weiss, Researcher and Founder at Elastagen, Sally-Ann Williams, Engineering Community & Outreach at Google, Whitney Komor, Founder and CEO of TheBestDay and hosted by Craig Reucassel of The Chaser.

If you'd like to find out more about Steve and what you will be learning in the Master Class you can watch his introduction video HERE.

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into Why Startups and New Businesses are Critical

Incase you missed it, you can also watch:

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 4: the state of tech in Australia

Welcome to Part 3 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In part 3 of this series we are going to be taking a look at Learning on the job vs Academic Training. There are a lot of people who have strong opinions about whether academic training is a thing of the past, but can learning on the job really replace years at university? As someone who didn't finish high school but has many years of experience behind him, this week Steve has a great discussion about the topic and touches on the advantages of academic programs, and why learning on the job is so important, especially in the technology industry.

"How do I rate learning on the job compared to academic training? I didn't quite finish high school so I don't have a great deal of experience in academia. But I have employed a lot of people who have those skills so i've seen that entire spectrum. I think when you learn, it's always the start to what you do. So the learning is the base of actually what occurs. In a lot of cases i'll actually look at an advanced learning, a degree or a bachelor of something or other as an indication that a person can knuckle down for a coupe of years and do something, they've got a bit of dedication in their life. Obviously those courses and degrees tend to impart some skills which is very important. But you actually want someone to be trainable and coachable. 

We're especially mostly in technology so you actually have to change with the times, and if anything changes it's technology. So if someone is too set in their ways, they're not trainable, they're not coachable, then you've got a lot of problems. There's a variety of things to look at, but on the job learning, not so much training, but learning, is very important in order to take the business forward."  

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into The State of Tech in Australia

Following on from Steve, you can also learn more about the change in academic training from Sir Ken Robinson. In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Ken makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.

Incase you missed it, you can also watch Part 1: Why ongoing learning is Important and Part 2: Steve Baxter on Ideas

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 3: learning on the job

Following from my previous articles on "Culture of Innovation" and "Management Practices that Foster Innovation", this one will cover the application of the Lean Startup concept in the workplace as a means to promote innovation in existing organizations.

Lean startup is a method for developing businesses and products first proposed in 2008 by Eric Ries. The application of its methodology allows startups to shorten their product development cycles by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. This concept is highly applicable in existing companies as it allows for the testing of new ideas and initiatives in a quick and cost effective manner. Additionally, the method enables a type of effective 'natural selection' of ideas and projects, permitting only the most promising to evolve.

So, what are the Lean Startup concepts that are applicable to existing organizations?

When you have an idea, you actually have a hypothesis. You have a supposition that what you have imagined will solve a problem or will create value somehow. However, the truth is, your hypothesis needs to be tested. And it needs to be tested in a fast and cost-effective manner, so that you can change it, evolve it and also test different hypotheses as many times as you can, so to ensure you have the best idea or solution that will be accepted by the client (internal or external).

Once you have your idea, project or product draftly defined, the first step in the Lean Startup framework is to "Know your customer". And customer can be external customers, internal clients/users or even yourself. 'Know your customer' seems very business 101 but, to this day, I am impressed about how many organizations do not properly understand who they want to create value for. The Know Your Customer step has 2 sub-steps: 1) Define the customer and 2) Understand the customer. 

For external customers, defining your customers means you have to identify, from the marketplace, who are the people or organizations you want to provide value for. It means you need to create a profile of your ideal customer. For an internal customer, it means you need to identify internally who your idea/project will benefit or impact. Let's take an example: let's say you have the idea to implement an online wiki system in order to host departmental policies and procedures in a way that it will be easier to frequently change/evolve them, collaborate upon them and effectively notify all people that need to know them when these documents are changed. In this case, your internal customers are the people who will both need to read the policies and procedures as well as the people who will write them.

The second subitem is to understand your customer. Talking to them goes a long way in getting to know them. Talk to as many as you can, being them internal or external customers. In the tech world, there is a saying that customers do not really know what they want until they see it (check the creation of the first iPhone as example). This is somehow true for finding innovative solutions. However, by talking to people, you will understand their needs. People may not understand exactly what they want, need or will value, but a smart person can understand the customer's underlying needs from talking to customers and they can come up with unique ways to fulfill them.

After talking with and understanding your potential customers, you usually have some additional information to already evolve somehow your idea. In any case, you need to start the Lean Startup loop so you can empirically test your idea in a cost-time-effective manner.

You start by building a very simple version of your idea to test it with your customers. The cost/time effectiveness of building it is key. You want to create a "Minimum Viable Product", something that can demonstrate the main value-adding features of your idea but that does not cost much in terms of money or time to build and test. MVPs can take many forms. An MVP of a smartphone app can be simply some basic drawings of the app interface on paper, so you can show it to your customers and check if they would buy it or if it would benefit them. Zappos, one of the largests online stores in the world, has a famous and brilliant example of use of an MVP. Zappos founder, Nick Swinmurn, to test the idea that people would buy shoes online, simply took pictures of shoes from his local shoe store and posted them in a quickly built simple website. When people purchased the shoes in his website, he would then buy the shoes in the physical store for the full price and would post them to his clients. In this way, Swinmurn deduced that customer demand was present, and Zappos would eventually grow into a billion dollar business based on the model of selling shoes online. 

In our Wiki policies and procedures example, a quick MVP could be achieved simply by entering into a free trial with an online Wiki software as a service provider, building a few wiki pages of policies and procedures and enlisting a few of your 'early adopter' internal clients to read and update the wiki documents. Their impressions would dictate if your idea would be adopted and/or how it could be improved.

When you have your MVP, you need to empirically test your idea. This means you need meaningful feedback and data. Test your MVP with early adopters, people drawn from your prospective client base that are open to accept imperfections and usually enjoy checking out new ideas. 

Most of the time, you will learn great insights from the feedback stage, which will allow you to evolve/adapt your idea to something that will actually be accepted by your client base. Sometimes you will get good insights for incremental improvements, sometimes you will even change your desired client base, sometimes your ideas will simply be proven not feasible, and sometimes you will find a completely different idea to solve the same problem. In any occasion, you create a new MVP, either evolving or changing the previous one, and continue the loop until you have something with the highest chance of success. The Lean Startup loop will allow your ideas and projects to be empirically tested and evolved. 

The main point of this article is to impress the need for ideas and initiatives to be quickly materialized and trialed in a very cost and time effective manner. People are very good at having ideas, but these are often based on assumptions that often end up not being valid. The era of large business plans with heavy budgets and long development and implementation periods for a project, just to find out that its underlying assumptions were wrong, has ended.

If an organization fosters an environment that allows for any people to lead initiatives, implement them with very little budget and test their hypothesis in a fast and effective manner, many new ideas can thus be tested at the same time by many different people. This is Natural Selection in effect in the organisation. You will foster the spawning of a large amount of ideas, throw them on the environment and the most appropriate/adapted will grow, evolve and prosper in a virtuous cycle that has been proved to create great things.

At Go1, we are constantly trying different ways of doing things. We have tested many different processes and tools to solve internal needs. We just have an open policy for people to try it out and see how it goes. If it gets traction, we evolve it and officially implement it in the remaining of the company. If not, well, we just try a different approach.

Applying Lean Startup in the workplace for innovation

Welcome to Part 2 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In this part of our Master Class with Steve we are going to be talking about How to Evaluate Ideas. As an investor, the ability to evaluate ideas is critical to Steve. Not understanding how to correctly evaluate ideas could be the difference between getting your startup up and running, and dealing with a range of problems that could have been easily avoided. In this episode, Steve explains how he goes about evaluating ideas, and gives you some tips so you can improve your thought process.

"G'day Steve Baxter here. I've been asked to give you some advice on how to evaluate ideas. The biggest ideas I evaluate nowadays are investments and businesses. You can probably see at the back there, we've got a couple up on the wall. Look for me on evaluating ideas, I don't tend to evaluate ideas, I tend to evaluate the person first and understand them. 

I want to know that this is going to be hopefully a relationship over many years, not too many years, and so we have to understand, can we work together? are they fundamentally good people who have the right approach to business and I suppose life and people? Then we actually look at the person. We actually look at their skill level. What can they do? what are they an expert at? and there's usually teams, and in their teams what are the relevant skills like?

Then we'll look at the problem they are trying to solve, and right at the end we'll start to look at the idea, their solution to that problem. So, we tend to make the idea the last thing in some respects. We really want to understand the people first."

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into Learning on the job vs Academic Training

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. This fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web.

Incase you missed it, you can also watch Part 1: Why ongoing learning is Important

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 2: Steve Baxter on Ideas

In a previous article, I wrote about how to create the basis of a culture of innovation in organizations. Here, I will put a few management concepts and practices that are effective in actually fostering that culture. 

The first one is Empowerment. A buzzword from decades ago, but still vital for an innovative organization. People must be given space and authority for testing and implementing their ideas without many hoops to go through. Empowerment is based on the idea that giving employees training, resources, authority, opportunity, motivation, as well holding them responsible and accountable for outcomes of their actions, will contribute to their competence, satisfaction and contribution. A good example of empowerment is Google's famous 20% time. Although the actual implementation of 20% time at Google is open for interpretation, people there are indeed free to create personal projects, gather contributors and team members from other departments and are encouraged to present it to other people for support and possible approval. It is said that Google News, Google’s autocomplete system, Gmail and AdSense, the advertising engine developed to support Gmail financially - now producing roughly a quarter of Google’s revenue - are examples of projects that span out of the empowerment that the 20% time policy gives to employees.

Related to the Empowerment concept, having a Project-based Approach to initiatives in the organization makes a big difference. Innovative organisations allow for every person, no matter their position, background or term of employment, to be a project leader. They allow for these people, when they present an idea, to lead their projects and assemble a team of interested people from any department in the company. When an initiative needs to be implemented, good leaders often select people who had the idea, or who will be impacted the most by the initiative, as the project leader. The organisational leaders then coach the project leaders into developing themselves, working in teams, being accountable and having them learn how to implement an initiative. This creates a culture of people wanting to implement improvements as a way to be noticed and grow in the organisation. It also opens interdepartmental communication. A project-based approach needs to be coupled with a proper structure for accountability, such as weekly or monthly project progress meetings. 

All initiatives, no matter how small they are, can benefit from a project-based approach, with a leader, team involved, and proper accountability. Some care must be taken not to stiff everything with long project plans in MS Project or other time-hungry practices for small projects. Things must be practical, especially for small projects or initiatives.

An innovative organization must be often reassessing its situation and be willing to see reality as it is so they can change and implement improvements sooner rather than later. There are several management tools that help leaders and managers to reassess their organisation. A favourite and very effective one is the SWOT analysis. The Organisational Culture and Climate Survey is another tool. So as Strategic meetings, especially if they include the participation of people from different departments and levels of the organisation. Inviting different employees to strategic meetings is something that promotes inclusion and transparency, as well as incentivizing new ideas and suggestions. Very transparent companies post in their internal social networks or intranets what they have been discussing in strategic meetings and encourage their employees to comment on it. Another tool to get a good pulse of the state of the organization, as well as new ideas, is to have an anonymous suggestion/feedback box (online and/or offline). Your employees, clients, suppliers and partners need to have an open channel to say what they want without the fear of retaliation. 

Having an open mindset and recognizing your shortfalls is also vital for an innovative organization. For many times, I have seen leaders simply not willing to accept their shortfalls or unable to accept problems in their companies. Recognising problems is the first step in fixing them. Some leaders reason that by recognising their problems they will spread negativity or show weakness to their employees, and thus will lose support or their leadership leverage. That is wrong. HOW you recognise your problems is what makes the difference. Yes, if you recognise a problem and show yourself defeated, you will lose leadership points. However, if a leader does not recognise a shortfall that is obvious to many people in the company, the leader will come out as unrealistic and sometimes arrogant. This also closes avenues for discussion of the problem and blocks innovation. Openly discussing problems allow for more people to suggest ideas on how to fix them. The most appropriate response to a real problem, especially one backed by data or understood by many people in the organisation, is for the leader to recognise it, prioritise it and create initiatives for overcoming it, always keeping an optmist outlook on things. Honest recognition is of utmost importance and so is the follow up with initiatives, with optimism, until it is fixed.

Another important practice is to promote inter-departmental or inter-team interactions. As per Steven Johnson's TED talk, Where good ideas come from, good ideas come from interaction of people from different backgrounds and experiences, in an environment that promotes free flow of information and ideas. Some very innovative companies go to the point of designing their office buildings in a way that will promote frequent informal meetings and gatherings of people from different teams in a manner that they can expose their challenges and data and others can help out with comments. Having a central meal place with long tables is something that can spark some conversations. Frequent company parties or happy hours is another example. Company getaways have the added benefit to promote team building as well as the exchange of ideas. Formal meetings are also beneficial, as long as these are properly facilitated and people from different teams are present and encouraged to participate and to contribute.

Another concept that needs to be placed here is the fact that people need to rest to be able to have good ideas. "Stress is a well known creativity killer" says psychologist Robert Epstein, PhD, in the American Psychological Association magazine. It is common in our days to reward extended hours of hard work. However, we often forget that time off is essential to finding better solutions to hard problems. Well deserved rest and leave time often not only charge people's internal batteries but also create sparks of many new ideas. They allows people to rest and observe the work situations and challenges from a higher, broader point of view. People often have game-changing ideas when they are on a leave and come back with the energy to implement them.

The next concept that has proved to foster innovation in organizations is the application of the lean startup concept into the workplace. This, however, deserves in its own article, that you will find here soon.

Management practices that foster innovation

Welcome to Part 1 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In this part of our Master Class with Steve we are going to be talking about Why ongoing learning is Important. Due to Steve's experience in the Army and in business, he has been involved in a number of programs with very different approaches to training and provides us with some great insight into how you should set up your team training programs.  During this weeks discussion we will be covering areas like keeping your team happy and motivated to give their best performance, improving processes and deviating from manuals.

"So why is training important? Training is vitally important, businesses are made up of people. The Best businesses are made up of the best people, but even the best people have to know what to do day to day. And if you're a founder or manager, it's probably behold on you to give your employees the most valuable feeling that you possibly can. Not only does it make business sense, but it's just a nice thing to do and a better work environment."

"I'm a huge fan of training. I'm a huge fan of manuals and procedures. That doesn't mean you should blindly follow your training, or blindly follow a manual or procedure, but you need to give your staff the empowerment where if the manual is wrong, change it and make it correct. They should never receive permission to blindly go off and do something wrong because it's written down. I'm a big fan of training, big fan of manuals. I spent my first nine years as a regular soldier and they were quite big on training and manuals and that's rubbed off a bit."

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into Steve Baxter on Ideas

To learn some more about why ongoing to learning is important, you can also have a look at this fantastic video from Wofford College president Ben Dunlap as he tells the story of Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who taught him about passionate living and lifelong learning.

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 1: why ongoing learning is important

Every organisation is desperate to be innovative these days. The threat of being killed by a young disruptive startup looms at almost every industry, from taxi to recruiting, from accommodation to accounting and so on. Yet, uncountable directives to be innovative coming from the top fail. Many times, large budgets are allocated to fuel innovation-related projects and little is actually accomplished. The quest to be innovative has many misconceptions and extreme challenges, both for large organizations and for smaller ones.

No matter what initiatives have been taken, the first and most important change that has to take place at an organisation that seeks to be innovative, is in its culture. This is easier said than done.

The change and championing of a desired Culture and Core Values has to come from the top. If the top is not aligned to the desired values and not willing to take the necessary actions to see them lived in the culture, your organisation will not be an innovative one and that is it. It might have some springs of innovation here and there, but they will eventually die and the organisation will not evolve well into the future. If you are at the top and reading this article, great, you have the right mindset. If you are not at the top, your first order of action is to make sure you or someone you know can influence and, ultimately, get the culture change buy-in (and true championing) from the top.

Considering that the top is won, a few things need to take place.

The first one is that your organisation needs to properly define the core values that will drive the culture you want it to have. Most of the time, core values are already defined and are known, but they are not really followed or championed. For core values to really drive company culture, they need to be lived by and championed by the leadership. That is why the top needs to be fully into this change.

When you are defining or reviewing your organizational values, make sure the basic ones needed for innovation are somehow listed among them. They are:


Open and honest communication. Ideas feed and grow from each other. It is a condition of their evolution into something successful (Check out the TED talk from Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From below). Additionally, people need to be able to safely expose their real problems and challenges, so that others can jump in with new ideas to help them out. Tools and initiatives need to be in place for people from different departments, business units, backgrounds and interests to talk to each other and contribute mutually in a frequent and effortless manner.

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web.

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from

Accepting and driving change. A large amount of excellent ideas will make no difference in an organisation if the environment does not accept change. People who are change-averse or who are "Devil's advocates" too often need to change or leave. In an innovative organization, there is no space for people constantly putting blocks on new initiatives (check the concept of Lean Startup if costs are of your concern). When hiring, it is important to make a good effort to identify people who will have a natural role of internal entrepreneurs ("intrapreneurs"). People with initiative must be recognized, no matter if they fail. An environment that facilitates experimentation and rewards action is also essential for innovation.

Selflessness and Teamwork, or something aimed at restricting egos that clog the innovation arteries. People who fight to keep ownership of an idea will hurt the innovation process. Ideas need to change and evolve, and this can only be done in a team environment, with people of all types and backgrounds contributing to ideas and mutating them into something better and better. Ideas need to be experimented and, if needed, abandoned, radically changed or even 'pivoted'. It is all part of the process of achieving innovation and whoever holds on to an obsolete idea only to get the credit of it, will damage the organisation and the innovation culture. Ideas are just the seed. Successful implementation and follow through is what really matters.

Continuous Learning. Learning and innovation walk hands in hands. People can only be innovative if they have a diversity of background information and knowledge to build ideas upon. As mentioned, ideas feed and grow from each other. All great minds stood on shoulder of giants. They all studied and acquired previous knowledge of a variety of their predecessors to be able to stitch concepts together, add their own experience, put a spin on it, and come up with a new concept. Knowledge, especially a good diversity of it, is essential to Innovation. Exposure of new concepts, due to continuous learning, always sparks new ideas in people's minds.

Courage to stand up for the organizational values and to withstand possible failure of initiatives. If people, and specially leaders, drop their energy and courage in standing up for the organisational values, the whole effort is doomed. It is everyone's responsibilities to remind each other and their leaders when the core values are not being followed. Innovation needs to be core to the culture, and the championing of the core values are central to the development of that culture.

How to actually make these values come to life in an organization is a matter of another article (and possible course), but here are a few ideas on the topic:

Most of the time, leaders define those core values and try to champion them but what usually happens is that they are often unable to grasp how aligned the organisation is to their core values and what to do about the possible lack of alignment. This blindness usually happens due too many levels of hierarchy, or sometimes by the leader's own inability to grasp the reality, or even due to the lack of tools and data to expose what is actually happening in the organisation. There is a blindness to how people are actually behaving and what is the actual alignment of the organisation to the desired core values. Organisations and their leaders usually lack the ability to see what the culture really is at the moment.

A good, properly mounted and applied Organisational Culture and Climate Survey can answer those questions and expose any incongruence between the desired culture and the actual one. I'll not go into details on how to create one here but if you want to know more about it, please click on this link and vote for the creation of an article or an online course on the topic.

Another matter of importance for creating an innovative organisation, is to have tools and practices at hand that enable leaders to live and apply those values in the workplace. I'll cover this in a following article. Check it out soon here.

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