The Eight Attributes of Bottom-Up Innovation Leaders
Bottom-up innovation is fueled by many ideas initiated by employees, as opposed to top-down innovation, which is fueled by a strong vision – often by the company’s founder. Bottom-up innovation leaders are entrepreneurial, supported by management’s emphasis on creativity and a can-do culture, and often share these eight attributes.
Everyone in the innovation blogosphere recognizes that innovation proceeds through two complementary modes: top down and bottom up.
Top-down innovation, as exemplified by Elon Musk’s companies – Tesla and Space X among others – is initiated and fueled by a strong vision, most often of the company’s founder. It is ambition-driven and implemented by senior leaders who organize the process from vision to reality. It happens with the support of the company’s employees who buy in and align with the vision.
Bottom-up innovation, as illustrated by Google and the archetypal 3M Company, is fueled by the many ideas initiated by employees. It is driven by entrepreneurs and is supported by a top management emphasis on creativity and the development of a can-do culture.
Both modes require dedicated innovation leaders, but these leaders have quite different characteristics and behavioral attributes.
In my experience, bottom-up innovation leaders are good at four major tasks:
To do this, bottom-up innovation leaders have at least eight critical aptitudes.
Bottom-up innovation leaders like to be surrounded by positive and talented individuals. They pursue and deploy small teams of A+ players, thus following Steve Jobs’ exhortation to turn the company into a “meritocracy of ideas with passionate people.”[1] They focus on leadership potential, which HR specialist Claudio Fernández-Aráoz[2] believes is more important than competencies per se. He defines potential as the combination of five elements: motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement and determination, all of them essential for innovation.
Bottom-up innovation leaders look for people with passion and an ability to share it. From his experience in head-hunting, Fernández-Aráoz proposes that there are three common motivators of these passionate people : autonomy, mastery and sense of purpose.[3] Daniel Borel, the charismatic co-founder of Logitech, stresses the importance of passion, saying, “We make a living, we exist and survive because of innovation. So, if someone would not share that passion at every level, he would not join Logitech.”[4]
In their search for creative people, bottom-up innovation leaders do not hesitate to hire, deploy and support mavericks, individuals who keep challenging the organization by regularly coming up with different ideas. Mavericks are often resented and considered to be “unguided missiles” by traditional organizations. However, if properly channeled, mavericks can bring new perspectives that may disrupt the competitive status quo.
Finally, bottom-up innovation leaders focus on detecting aspiring champions, people who are neither prima donnas nor individualists, but who have the potential to promote collaborative problem solving.
Bottom-up innovation leaders accept that serendipity will always remain an important source of creative ideas, yet they hope to increase the odds by proposing framing guidelines to their teams. They know that opportunities and threats often come from changes in the corporate environment. So they encourage their teams to build insight and foresight about these changes. The objectives of this search for intelligence are (1) to identify and validate early signals of changes in the company’s regulatory, industry and market environment; (2) to anticipate the creation or convergence of new market segments; (3) to sense emerging trends in customer behavior; (4) to detect likely disruptive pressures on current business models; and (5) to anticipate the emergence of new technologies and competitors.
