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This is a contentious question. It’s akin to asking “if leadership can be learnt”. It often splits a group of people right in the middle.

Before I share my answer with you, let me say that innovation is part individual, part organizational and part contextual.

The contextual part is uncontroversial. This concept is burned into our cultural vocabulary through proverbs like “dire situations inspire ingenious solutions” or the more famous “necessity is the mother of invention”. In other words, having a deep understanding of the customer is a pre-requisite for any meaningful customer-relevant innovation. This sounds quite reasonable. In practice this means that one must have good access to friendly sophisticated customers. 

In a way the individual part is also not so controversial. Innovation involves creativity and comes from imaginative individuals. Eliminate people’s imagination and creativity and you will kill innovation. The logical next question is: Is creativity innate to us or is it learnt? This is where it starts to get interesting… Is the creative urge like religious belief that’s hard to repress (indeed how it resurfaced quickly even after 70 years of communist repression)? Or is like written language that comes only from active learning? Which worldview you embrace is important. If you are in nurture camp then you are appalled by India’s rote learning schooling and feel that we are creating permanently stunted individuals. The nature camp folks are more sanguine. They think the schooling methodology is unfortunate but it’s not fatal to getting innovative individuals.

Aha, the debate is now warming up. It gets really exciting when we get to the third part – the organization aspect of innovation. What’s not contentious is that organizations play a role in the evolution of an insight (something that GE calls “imagination breakthroughs”) into a product or a business model. Some organizations provide a better habitat than others for this evolutionary journey.

Why is it that some organizations, indeed ecosystems, provide better habitat for innovation than others? Is it because they are a better cradle - i.e. more insights are born there? Or is that that more of these insights reach maturity because it’s a less toxic habitat? Is it both? In my view it is both those factors. May be you have a different opinion on this. But stay with me for a minute longer. I want to explore the organization solution space in growing innovation. In other words, if an organization wants to become a better habitat for innovation, what must it do?

The cradle metaphor tells us that bringing the customer context inside and up-close-and-personal to most employees will trigger more insights. Some of these insights become propositions, propositions become prototypes, and prototypes become real-world implementations. These implementations can be new products or new business models. Either way the journey to maturity requires effort, action and momentum. How easy is to harness this effort? How easy is it to sustain the momentum? The answers to these questions varies from organization to organization. Those organizations that proactively reduce their innovation toxicity will see more insights blossom into reality.

But there limits to what an organization can do especially if it’s large and successful. Clayton Christensen argues that successful firms have built-in toxicity that kills disruptive innovation. At best they can become good at various types of sustaining innovation. Disruptive innovation has to come from smaller organizations. In spite of these caveats, all said and done, fostering innovation in organizations is possible and even desirable.

This brings me back to the original question: can innovation be learnt? On reflection, perhaps a better question to ask is: can innovation intensity be increased? The answer to that is a qualified yes. To increase innovation intensity, one needs to holistically attack all the three facets – contextual, organizational and individual – that contribute to innovation. This can be done. While, as we have seen here, there are still some contentious areas (e.g. role of education in creating innovative individuals), these issues are more about mechanics of raising innovation intensity rather than about whether it can be done.

Today innovation management is a very nascent field but one that’s rapidly maturing. Right now, it offers only a bag of techniques but now an overall management philosophy is emerging. I feel that innovation management as a field will move from periphery to the core of the company in the next 2-3 years.

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