I accept that the context for these attributes is the corporate environment—a fundamentally different context to learning communities. The goals are different; the investment is different; the motivations for success are different; the measurement of progress is different; the urgency for change is different.
Despite those differences, I am still curious about what we might learn from these insights. Our challenge in education is to stay open to lessons from other sectors and to explore how this connects to educational innovation.
The questions that resonate with me are:
Are your people motivated, rewarded, and organised to innovate repeatedly?
The best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibers of their culture, from the core to the periphery.
Do you regard innovation-led growth as critical, and do you have cascaded targets that reflect this?
Anything less risks encouraging inaction or the belief that innovation is someone else’s job.
Do you invest in a coherent time- and risk-balanced portfolio of initiatives with sufficient resources to win?
“One of the hardest things to figure out is when to kill something,” says Kumsal Bayazit, RELX Group’s chief strategy officer. “It’s a heck of a lot easier if you have a portfolio of ideas.”