This project investigates the culture within the Innovation Center at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). Second, what elements of the organization's culture can limit the Innovation Center in the SNHU innovation process.
Review of the Literature
While participation is integral to innovation, there can be tension when ideas challenge C-suite interests (Dombrowski et al., 2007). Part of the learning orientation of innovation cultures is that employees constantly learn from each other and that knowledge is shared across boundaries within one.
Introduction and Context
The Innovation Center consists of four areas (Table 2) that work together to develop technology, process and competency innovations (SNHU Innovation Center). The Innovation Center has been an integral part of the transformation SNHU has undergone over the past decade.
Guiding Questions
Innovation culture is defined as "a multidimensional context, which includes the intention to be innovative, the infrastructure to support innovation, the operational-level behaviors necessary to influence a market and value orientation, and the environment to implement innovation" ( Dobni, 2008, p. 540). These definitions will support the investigation into the culture of the Innovation Center and the development of recommendations for improvement.
Conceptual Frameworks
This research strategy was appropriate given the nature of the capstone and the intention to understand the specific innovative environment of the Innovation Centre. Observations added to the richness of the narrative through a participatory experience at the Innovation Center that revealed both formal and informal practices that drive their innovation culture. These methods created greater clarity and led to a richer understanding of the organization's culture and their innovation process.
The semi-structured interviews helped build a narrative of the culture within the Innovation Center and the elements behind their success. Fortunately, conversations took place with employees at each of the designated staffing levels within the organization. The scores for each of the six building blocks were then averaged to determine the innovation coefficient (Rao & Weintraub, 2013).
Staff at each of the designated levels (executive leadership, director and staff) completed the survey. It should be noted that an examination of the innovation environment after.
Findings
The Innovation Center has a strong vision and mission driven focus tailored to add value and address yet-to-be realized future challenges
The staff of the Innovation Center was guided by a common purpose and effort to improve the vision set by the President of the institution. The Innovation Center embodied this idea of working towards accelerating organizational performance by pursuing a single goal. In the Innovation Center, work was carried out that led to the common goal of the institution.
Through these three questions, the Innovation Center demonstrated a commitment to only work on projects that were in line with the institution's strategic commitments. Our president has a strong vision, and that vision carries down to the community, and so much of it is expressed in the work we do at the Innovation Center. Another participant noted the importance of aligning the missions across the work being done across the Innovation Centre.
The Innovation Center has cultivated a safe space where employees are valued as integral to driving innovation and encouraged to be creative, experiment, and embrace
As a result of the supportive environment and security created, the Innovation Center was able to emphasize being creative, experimental and constantly pursuing learning opportunities. 49 employees to be creative is a driving force for innovation. 2007) emphasized the importance of creating a climate in which employees felt comfortable participating in experiments without restrictions. Our team also brings that curiosity and we bring motivation to look forward to the future, remembering to be practical in our experiments.
These comments reflected the ideas presented by Dobni (2008) that innovation cultures accept risk and are error tolerant due to the learning that can occur from failure. Elements of the Innovation Center's culture, which contributed to a safe space where employees felt comfortable to experiment and play, were supported by the results of the Innovation Quotient questionnaire. These factors contribute to the Innovation Center's ability to pursue change initiatives that enable SNHU to be at the forefront of emerging technologies in higher education.
Senior leadership drives the innovation agenda
A basic assumption (Schein, 1984) presented by management is that ideas are brought forward across the institution, but the data collected showed that managers drove the innovation agenda. There are a lot of top-down initiatives that are given to the Innovation Center employees, but we are starting to see other groups bring ideas to the table. While the leadership team at the Innovation Center has been critical to cultivating a strong innovation culture and establishing a foundation for a thriving innovation process, the emphasis on management-driven projects can hold the organization back from being even more innovative.
While the Innovation Center has been very successful in their innovative pursuits, the data collected indicated that this is greater. Participants noted that members of the larger campus community often use the space for various meetings and activities. We need more visibility of ongoing efforts [and] the ability for more of the team to solve problems or provide insights.
Discussion
Across the Innovation Center, leaders were critical in establishing the innovation focus and setting the tone for a unique vision. However, the data indicated a disconnect between voices within the Innovation Center and those from the rest of the community. 56 and Curiosity employees in the Innovation Center focused on identifying solutions to problems that the institution identified as future threats.
The Innovation Center only undertook projects that added value to the student experience. The innovation center's employees were able to get involved in different projects across the organization's workflows and interact with different elements of the innovation work. The culture of the innovation center is an integral part of their commitment to innovation and a strong innovation process.
Recommendations
The Innovation Center should seek out opportunities for staff to engage members of the greater university community to enable increased knowledge
However, there are opportunities for the organization to further improve its innovation culture and thereby improve its innovation process. 61 each other by opening opportunities to collaborate with other community members would only increase their innovation potential. 2007) noted that managers need to be sensitive in how they create opportunities to cross boundaries. One way management could facilitate these opportunities is by surveying staff about their secondary interests and creating opportunities for staff to join campus committees or subgroups.
These interactions would create opportunities for sharing natural knowledge and increase awareness of the Innovation Center's work. More informal staff could be encouraged to tap into their communities of practice to again increase the organization's knowledge-sharing capacity. The Innovation Center has demonstrated a strong innovation process and thriving innovation culture among their staff, and this recommendation creates an opportunity to further strengthen their innovation capabilities within the institution.
The Innovation Center should emphasize a greater balance in where projects come from, reducing the current top-down innovation approach
Swan, Scarborough, and Robertson (2002) found that communities of practice have the potential to positively influence innovation and promote learning throughout the organization. By focusing primarily on innovation projects identified as important to leadership, the organization misses the opportunity to embrace potentially more important and impactful innovations that may be identified as a need elsewhere. If the underlying assumption that the entire organization values and embraces innovation is to be true, then there is a need for greater involvement in the innovation ideation process.
The Innovation Center should create a system for tracking the number of issues that are driven by leadership versus those that are driven by staff or community members. Embracing greater democratic communication will enable increased exchange of ideas that can lead to value-oriented initiatives and a more inclusive innovation process. 2007) noted that it can often be a challenge for organizations to embrace growth. There may be a fear that ideas will clash with those identified as important to senior leadership, but those organizations that can embrace this conflict and see it as an opportunity to advance their market place are more likely to benefit from the positive results attributed to the innovation. .
The Innovation Center should identify and nurture idea sponsors to enhance community participation in innovation
63 also has the relational and organizational skills needed to nurture someone who has an idea and then advocate for the adoption of that idea. By embracing idea sponsors, the Innovation Center has an opportunity to enhance community participation in the innovation process. As noted in finding four, leadership drives the innovation agenda and projects are chosen largely based on who presented the idea.
In order to widen the funnel and increase their innovative capacity, the Innovation Center should identify idea sponsors across the other departments at SNHU. These idea sponsors should be trained and provided with the necessary tools to support the members of their teams and communities of practice through the idea generation process. As a relatively new entity that has only been on campus for five years, the Innovation Center would benefit from increased exposure, and idea sponsors and innovation champions across departments would enable greater knowledge sharing and creative endeavors across the university.
Limitations
The timeline for data collection was fortunate as interviews and on-site observations took place in March 2020 just before stay-at-home orders were announced. Had it not been for the stay-at-home orders, the observations would have been extended to another week. Similarly, additional interviews were scheduled to take place in person which were unable to take place due to changing priorities.
Limitations also exist in the decision to focus only on the Innovation Center rather than the entire institution. There is valuable data to be collected on innovation at the institutional level that has the potential to influence the findings of the data found within the Innovation Hub. The institution has embraced innovation as a core principle, and identifying whether or not the same forces exist across the university would add meaningful insight.
Conclusion
The role of leadership in creating culture within the Innovation Center cannot be underestimated. Strong leadership gives the Innovation Center access to key resources that support their initiatives. This investigation presented specific elements of the organization's culture that contributed to the Innovation Center's innovation process.
In doing so, this study named the elements and identified recommendations to support improvements across the Innovation Center and the larger SNHU community. Innovation Center management can leverage this information to identify measures to incorporate into their innovation process and identify opportunities for improvement across their innovation efforts. As the institution and the Innovation Center continue to grow, it creates the potential for them to embrace the recommendations for improvement to further ensure that they maintain their culture of innovation and see continued success across their initiatives.
Measuring innovation culture in organizations: Developing a generalized construct of innovation culture using exploratory factor analysis. The moderating role of innovation culture in the relationship between knowledge assets and product innovation. The impact of organizational culture on creativity and innovation: A review of the literature and implications for human resource development.
What about the culture of the Innovation Center that supports the innovation process? Have you been involved in previous KPI development efforts at the Innovation Center? Which types of KPIs are useful for an innovative context such as the Innovation Center.
