Does Consensus Kill Creativity?

Can innovation thrive in a culture of comfort? Businesses believe it's more likely to flourish in environments that "challenge convention and consider new ways of solving problems", according to an Adobe study. But is Britain's workforce up to a daily brainstorming barney?

Maintaining a constant siege mentality just to ensure some blue-sky thinking is untenable -- and is not where the true value of innovation lies.

The value's in the commercialisation of a new idea, a far more strategically-driven and less glamorous adjunct to the Eureka moment, and one that is harder to sustain.

"Firms that are successful will have a cultural approach alongside the tools and technologies," according to Professor David Gann, head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College London.

Collaboration, both within and outside organisations, is becoming key. Increasingly, he notes, the expense of innovation has driven companies to adopt a distributed or Open Source approach using Web-enabled portals such as e-Science or crowdsourcing. Procter & Gamble's Connect & Develop is a modern-day example, but Charles Leadbeater's "We-Think" dates cross-industry collaboration back to 19th century Cornish mining engineers.

Necessity and accident play their part, but there's a need for business-readiness and expertise in-house to capture an idea's value at any stage of the process. Not every idea will be a ground-breaker. Gann suggests it may be more valuable to be a "fast follower" than a first-mover in some markets, citing Microsoft as a prime example.

A company may have several innovative scenarios going at once. They need to be managed differently and are likely to need different types of people, incentivised appropriately. A rebellious risk-taker is unlikely to take to the sedate pace of an established project where continuous improvement is the strategy.

"Rules are needed," says Gann. "But you still need a 'barbarian at the gate', and the chief executive needs to be the biggest barbarian. Not many boards are ambidextrous enough."