Innovation in Uncertain Times: How to Trigger it and Cultivate it? Some Insights to Leaders…

My title might suggest an upcoming list of advice and a recipe for creating and cultivating innovation. Quite to the contrary, the road to a culture of innovation is steep and full of unknown hurdles and it never ends. In fact, it should never end, and instead constantly evolve. If the last decade is any indicator, the pace of technology is likely to continue to further advance all things in our lives and to change the way we live and work in this new decade and age of information. Thus, we all need to constantly keep up with this explosive pace of change.

Which brings me back to my initial topic: Innovation . . .

I would like to start off by drawing from and reflecting on my own experience in education and scientific research, first when I spent 30 years at Stanford university as a faculty member and graduated 60 PhD students and brought 100 million dollars to Stanford from the American government for research all over the world on seven different continents and then as the President of Ko? University, one of the top research universities in Turkey and the region.

Uncertainty and dealing with uncertainty have now become the norm across the world, often termed as our 'new normal' after COVID-19. However, uncertainty and dealing with uncertainty has always been present in our lives long before this pandemic hit our planet.

 Regardless of this pandemic, the fact of the matter is that we really do not know what is going to happen tomorrow; for example, we have no idea what professions are going to be the most favorable or the most in demand ten years from now or even five years from now. As I am constantly asked this question by students, faculty, parents, business and industry leaders and many more, what I have been telling them is to fall back to a broadly-based education. In other words, you cannot selectively specialize or go deeply in any one area anymore because you do not know whether that area is going to be the one that would stay with you and be fruitful for you from the point of view of enjoyment and fulfillment for the next 10-20-30 years. Instead, a broadly-based education which keeps opportunities open in the future is the right way to go especially in times of uncertainty.

From the point of view of innovation and creativity, a common mistake made at universities in traditional approaches to education and to scientific research is to attempt to manage the system and very often over manage the system. At the beginning of each academic year, I address the new faculty who have just arrived at Ko? University and I tell them to be agents of change, not agents of the protection of status quo. I tell them that as they go to their departments and schools and meet their more experienced, more senior colleagues, their utmost concern should not be to conform to those departments. I tell them to specifically resist suggestions from those more senior colleagues, in terms of how they may best ‘fit’ therein, but instead to be revolutionaries at heart and think about change and evolution for the better. I assure them that the university does not ask the advice of any of those senior faculty in their departments for their promotions or their annual evaluations to determine the portfolio of benefits or any other things that the university can provide for them. We direct our newest faculty in this way because a university can only keep up with the rapid pace of change by allowing the most recent, the youngest and the most current ones in their faculty to lead. Unfortunately though, most universities take the easier path of top-down description and definition of the paths to be followed; not knowing that in doing so they may limit themselves by the finite number of paths in their own portfolio of experiences.

The key idea here is to hire the best people that you possibly can, recruit the best students and best faculty that you possibly can and then as the President of the university and the rest of the upper administration, ‘get out of their way’, by aiming not to govern them but to create the freest environment in which they can roam freely to do whatever they want within reason of legalities and bureaucracies involved. In other words, one should aim to govern without governing. When you have already done your due diligence in hiring and recruiting the best, you should not define, from the top, what ways things should be done; you should not define where the rivers should flow, instead allow the rivers of curiosity, excitement and passion to flow and do your best to carve the course of those rivers. I basically pinch myself every day to see and make sure that I do not conform to the norms and to the very attractive desire to govern and tell people what to do. My utmost concern is  to always protect my notion of governing by getting out of the way. In other words, when students or faculty ask me what they should be doing, I might in general discuss the several different opportunities and options in my mind, but I specifically refrain from advising them so as to allow them to carve their own paths. There is nothing wrong with being workman-like and conscientious; however, in the most advanced cases of conscientiousness and hard work, there is really very little innovation because in a workmanlike environment one acts as if everything is defined and that one is just punching the right buttons and going through defined steps in their work environments.

We should always be wary of the trap we might fall into by completely closing ourselves to innovation, discovery, renewal and most importantly, ‘serendipity’. Serendipity entered the English lexicon quite late in 1754 but yet is the most important word in the English language in my opinion from the point of view of research and development because without allowing for it, you cannot have real discoveries; without serendipity, you basically have things that you know and that you are planning to do. In thinking about Research & Development (R&D), it is important to realize that ‘Research’ is the pursuit of the ‘unknown unknowns’ while ‘Development’ is the pursuit of the ‘known unknowns’. So, for example, when we have interactions between industry and universities, the industry comes to the university with a set of problems (known unknowns) that they have and seek solutions and surely any university would have a collage of experts that would fit to the collage of questions and unknowns to address the problems of the industry. However, such partnership is one that may best be categorized as ‘Development’ encompassing little if any ‘Research’. True research involves the pursuit of the unknown unknown so much so that when you start, you may well not even know what you are going to discover. It is thus extremely important for all leaders of institutions, companies, divisions of companies that in addition to solving known problems, they also think of the fact that they should allow the pursuit of the unknown unknown.  Doing so may involve doing ten things; nine of which might result with theses and papers on the shelf but one may produce that unbelievable finding which might do two things: it might save the institution from falling off a cliff or it might raise their awareness about an opportunity that might make them fly out of the box.

Related to this idea of creating a free environment, very often universities, in my opinion, make the mistake of having strategic plans because once you write down a five-year strategic plan, unless you are very careful and always cognizant of the fact that you may now be shackled by that strategic plan, you may in fact end up being limited by it. Especially after a year of being confined to our homes and busy with online modality of learning, teaching, working and living due to a global pandemic, we should all question and re-evaluate how we formulate our long-term plans, allowing ourselves enough flexibility to change our course swiftly when and if necessary.

 One might pose the question of how to overcome the difficulty of achieving strategic objectives while allowing people to follow their rivers of passion. Doing so is indeed difficult; however, here is how I view it. On my door, as people enter my office, at the eye level so they cannot miss it, there is a saying of Oscar Wilde;

 ‘Consistency is the Last Refuge of the Unimaginative.’

Oscar Wilde

This utterance of the brilliant Wilde is a very important concept; people should learn to be able to not be consistent by examining each problem or opportunity that they have on their table in its own merits and if necessary, making inconsistent decisions for that problem that is different from their previous decisions. It is so very easy to uniformize everything and just go with the same solution for a particular problem that initially worked on previous problems; but consistency basically maintains the status quo and while it thus does not ‘rock the boat’, it also moves you closer to mediocrity; if you cannot imagine, the easiest thing you can do is to be consistent. Therein lies the challenge . . .

True creativity can only be produced in environments where people are completely free; free of programmatic or curricular restrictions and all societal and traditional norms and expectations. In my opinion, this liberation of the human spirit is the only way to pursue innovation especially in these days and times.

If you want to create true innovation, true discoveries that might lead to fantastic companies like Apple and Google which were, 30 years ago, totally out of the blue, you have to spend resources by doing things that in the next five years you are not going to need. It might look like a waste of money and if you are a CEO, it is likely to be a real hole in your annual budget, but it might change what your company might look like in five years from now. Unfortunately, most CEOs think about the current budget term, and they may not be able to see the future, but they have to be bold and embrace that Silicon Valley startup mentality if they look forward to being there in the future and if they want to engage the full potential of talent early on when they join the workforce.

Let me conclude with a few final thoughts . . .

I have seen a lot of people that come from different schools of education in different countries where they have knowledge crammed down their throats. I mean they know so much that they have taken all levels of courses in a given topic and they thus know everything about the topic there is to know. At that point, they cannot create anything new because they are often shackled by their own knowledge of what is possible and what is not. Literally one is limited by knowing too much! So, I think the balance between not knowing anything and knowing too much is a delicate one and the person with his or her curiosity can guide you if you just allow some mistakes to be made by giving them the opportunity to fall on their faces occasionally as long as they get up and continue doing great things . . . 

I view university education as an appointment between generations . . . In this appointment, my generation as the instructors and professors meet the generation of students and we learn from and teach to one another; we do not have a one-way communication. I, as a professor, cannot act as if I know more than those young people, generation Z, who know many things that I have no clue about and together, in this learning and teaching environment, we may reap most of the benefits of the appointment between generations.

This appointment is not only limited to universities but to all our lives, professional, social and personal . . . This appointment is not merely a meeting of two or more parties but also includes the engagement between them. In the business environment, we might think of the appointment as between the managers and administrators and the employees, especially the new recruits. Those new minds, fresh out of college or graduate school with minimum to no experience might indeed be the agents of change.

As leaders, then, we should shy away from leading too much and create a free environment, protecting it at all costs.