Equally, there are organizational environments that can defeat innovation in even the hardiest souls, as well as those that have amazing success at generating innovation from a large part of their employee base (think Toyota Production System). Focusing on the extreme ends of either continuum does not lead to a long-term integrated solution. What are of more practical value are the steps that businesses can take to improve the overall climate for innovative thinking in their organizations. Companies are best served by providing the conditions under which the largest possible proportion of their employees can potentially create greater value for their customers and for the organization itself. There are a number of factors that contribute to an innovation climate including: information richness, diversity, fear reduction, and teamwork.

Information Richness
One of the factors that influence the potential for innovation is the information richness of the work environment. Researchers have pointed out how much innovation is dependant on – even defined by – the creative recombination of existing ideas and technologies. Hargadon (in How Breakthroughs Happen) talks about innovation as relying in significant part, on bridging organizational boundaries and trafficking in ideas and technologies that originate in diverse environments. It is part of creating and exploiting a climate of information richness and diversity. Work environments that are information rich provide grist for the creative mill for everyone immersed in them. They provide the raw material from which ideas can be creatively combined and recombined and fresh insight can emerge. Information richness can be fostered in numerous ways through ventures inside-and-outside the company. The goal is to break traditional boundaries and create new linkages between people and ideas. Richness can be stimulated by, for example:

• Cross-company collaboration
• Benchmarking visits
• Attending seminars in related fields
• Rotating between departments
• Creating stimulating intranets
• Putting info feeds on the desktop
• Encouraging personal projects
• Customer visits
• Joining professional associations

When the challenge is seen broadly as enriching the informational/experiential environment in the service of generating broader thinking and problem-solving, there are numerous methods that will work for different companies. The goal is not to compound indiscriminate information overload, but to encourage stimulation and a broader stretch for ideas.

Diversity
Diversity can be regarded as part of developing information richness, but deserves special mention of its own. Going back to the question of mindset, few things reinforce a narrow mindset more strongly than working every day with a group of people from similar backgrounds who essentially look, think, and talk the same. The concept of workplace diversity was originally applied to achieving better racial and ethnic balance in companies dominated by white males. But, equally or more important when it comes to innovation, is diversity of thought and perception.

Achieving meaningful diversity in a given context will differ for each company. Superficial differences don't stimulate very much; differences in education, work experience, geography, value system, and personal career passion are more meaningful. Diversity of thought can be helped along by conventional methods like creating teams that have racial, ethnic, gender, or functional diversity, or it can be pushed into higher gear by employing more radical methods. Bob Sutton (in Weird Ideas That Work) takes the-bull-by-the-horns suggesting things like hiring "slow learners" who are less readily influenced by existing organizational norms, hiring people who make you uncomfortable (or who you actually dislike!), and encouraging people to defy superiors and peers. The point is to create an environment in which diverse ideas and points-of-view are not just tolerated, but actively and forcibly injected into the organizational mix. Sutton's radical suggestions highlight how routinely we operate in a homogeneous comfort zone and how hard we need to work to explicitly disrupt it in the service of innovation.

Diversity is no more a "silver bullet" than any other method of influencing the organizational climate. The trick to making it work is managing it, balancing the relative disorder and discomfort it may generate with the need for common purpose and stability.

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