How Corporations Kill Creativity and Why Corporate Innovation Labs Fail

How do corporations kill creativity? If you’ve ever worked in a 9-5 job, you already know the answer.

Photo credit: Elijah O'Donnell

When a company is a young and new startup, there isn’t a set of rules to follow. What is the right way to run the business? You don’t know. You can test different hypotheses, follow your intuition, and anything is possible, sky's the limit.  

Then, the growing pain. There need to be predictable and repeatable processes in place, so businesses can create revenue drivers and scale. Everyone in the company needs to know what to expect, and who does what.

You: we’re very happy to have you on board as the new marketing manager. But in fact, your real job is to answer emails. 

Many procedures are basically an automation system, sometimes that even includes automating decision making, and it’s a good thing. Businesses absolutely need procedures in place in order to grow and it’s building up the competitive moat around that business as well. 

The irony is, predictable and repeatable processes are often what kills creativity. When everything is predictable, we put ourselves on autopilot as well. We get to work and become a corporate robot for 8 hours, before we are “free” to be ourselves again, until the next day.

While companies automate, we kiss our personal autonomy goodbye.

But companies need to keep innovating themselves. It ensures long-term competitiveness. This is especially important in an ever-changing world and market. 

Remember when these companies were so cute and harmless? Awwww (baby pictures)

Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple were recently grilled by the U.S. Congress because they are too big. They became huge conglomerates. Even they started small and nimble. 

They are no longer driving innovation either - instead, they try to buy up smaller startups. 

In a recent study conducted by Ogilvy Consulting, large corporations buy startups to acquire key technologies, rekindle innovation, bring products and services to market faster, and shake up the stale corporate culture.

That’s right, to shake things up a bit.

Sadly, this is often the end of the startups being acquired, even though initially they may have been promised with autonomy. 

Because, how do you shake things up and influence the culture of a large corporation when the large corporation demands control? The same goes with innovation labs: how does the innovation lab fuel the rest of the corporation with energy, if the rest of the business units are not aligned with a common vision? The innovation ends up exactly where it started, in a lab. 

There is a silver lining though: this is just an integration problem, and studies have shown that constraints are great for creativity. 

For the acquired startup or the innovation lab alone to facilitate that change is difficult. Even if they have the buy-in from the CEO of the large corporation, the startup or innovation lab is still left alone to convince the rest of the corporation. That’s feeding gladiators to the lions.

So what can large corporations do to fuel creativity and innovation into their organizations? There are two vital needs.

First, companies need creative leaders in place as innovation stakeholders. They are the catalyst for change, and they need to be empowered. Creative leaders serve a vital role in injecting innovative thinking in their teams that will work with other teams to ensure tangible business outcomes. It’s so important to make sure the creative leaders are not sacrificed in internal politics. Because some people don’t like to change. 

Easier said than done, I know. 

The second thing is that the behavior companies must incentivize is collaboration, not competition. If everyone working in the company can freely and safely collaborate with each other, across departments, I guarantee creative sparks will fly and silos? Why silos? 

Failing to make innovation the DNA of a company - you know what happens to those companies.