HOW TO CREATE AN INNOVATION HUB
Many cities are pinning their hopes on innovation hubs, clusters of innovators and entrepreneurs from different disciplines under one roof, mixing together and, the hope goes, creating businesses. Innovation hubs are still relatively new and their effectiveness is uncertain, but a pair of academics has produced this report on best practices.
What are innovation hubs?
The Innovation Center is a community of industry entrepreneurs and academic researchers working in partnership to instigate breakthroughs: fusing the uncommon, taking risks, thinking big. What makes hubs different is that they have the explicit mission to foster innovation by promoting learning and the sharing of ideas. To this end, hubs bet on collaborative innovation and community, as well as on openness and diversity.
Innovation hubs offer varying combinations of services and follow a variety of business and sustainability models. Mostly, members get access to co-working and desk space, office infrastructure, events, and the hub’s contact network (often in exchange for a recurring fee). Setting up shop in hip, vibrant, up-and-coming urban neighborhoods makes most hubs more attractive for their target groups and supports their convening function.
A hub would usually recruit a ‘community manager’, ‘curator’ or ‘host’ to act as a broker in the network of members and other stakeholders, encourage new connections, manage the office, organize events and generally take care of the smooth functioning of the community. The physical space of a hub would normally be complemented by an active online community of its members on social networking platforms.
Which innovation approaches make hubs special?
When hubs started to emerge, they were likened to concepts well-known to innovation managers, such as incubators, science parks, research labs or communities and networks of practice. However, while innovation hubs incorporate functional elements of all of these, they also appear unique and new in the way that they combine tried-and-true methods with networking and community-based ideas.
Several approaches and strategies that make hubs special and can serve as inspiration for innovation managers.
1. Embrace fluidity and diversity:
Hubs mold a community of like-minded innovators and entrepreneurs, but community membership is fluid, and passers-through from various strands of life and work are welcome. Hubs allow for new combinations of existing knowledge bases that otherwise would not happen. In effect, hubs convene groups of people that usually would not “run into” one another, while they are likely to form teams and innovate together once they have found each other. It is this flowing and connecting of diverse people and knowledge that is at the heart of the “hub” concept.
2. Focus on impact:
Whereas traditional business incubators usually focus on financial growth targets, innovation hubs often emphasize the sense of a common mission, usually in the form of ‘impact’ their members strive to have.
Impact is definitely ‘in’ these days, as business and social organizations alike have understood innovating just for the sake of pushing the bottom line will not suffice in the long run. Hubs become an expression of the wider phenomenon that individuals and organizations are redefining success as the influence they have on their communities, the positive changes they bring to their clients and the footprint they leave on their environment.
Crucially, the desire to have impact can motivate people to be creative, to go beyond the usual solutions, to share and to take risks. Innovation hubs remind us that by refocusing from short-term results to vision and impact, an organization stands a better chance of truly engaging its employees and other stakeholders in more radical innovation.
3. Encourage serendipity:
Innovation hubs go out of their way to make people ‘bump’ into each other, mingle and casually collide as often as possible. Work spaces have an open layout with a modular structure, with furniture that encourages flexible co-working, no assigned work stations, and often a common kitchen for informal interactions. New encounters are further facilitated through networking sessions, informal drinks, professional speed dating meetings, common lunches and so on.
It’s crucial that the people that meet each other add something new for each other. And so innovation hubs are designed to be true melting pots where different professions, backgrounds, nationalities and cultures meet.
Such efforts have one assumption in mind: one simply has to bring the right people together, and serendipity and personal initiative will take care of the rest. This is exactly where traditional organizational setups often fall short. Serendipity, by its definition, is not something that can be instigated by top-down management. The art of serendipity lies in bringing people together but then ‘letting go’ and allowing for random creative clashes of minds.
4. Create a sense of community:
The members of innovation hubs don’t self-identify as just any group of people. They see themselves as communities of like-minded people, sharing common beliefs, jargon and even a common lifestyle.
While innovation hubs are quite easily accessible to new members, their common mission and organizational ‘subculture’, combined with the trendy office design in cosmopolitan surroundings, allow them to create a shared feeling of being exceptional and unique. Such a sense of exclusivity and community also helps diminish typical innovation obstacles such as fear of failure or reluctance to share ideas.
5. Intensify collaborative innovation:
Besides enabling unplanned collaborations through serendipity, innovation hubs deliberately stimulate collaborative activities in a variety of ways. Co-location and co-working principles are some of the basic methods they apply. Innovation hubs also share online spaces and collaboration technologies. Co-creation is perceived as part of their DNA and methods such as crowdsourcing, co-creation, design thinking, service design, user innovation or their variations are applied on a regular basis to further stimulate it.
6. Dynamize the innovation process:
Innovation hubs are constantly on the hunt for new ideas. Instead of housing quiet R&D labs, their premises are meant to be bustling with events such as innovation jams, hackathons, pitches, innovation challenges, idea competitions and brainstorms. The value of such a dynamic and lively approach to the innovation process lies not only in the actual ideas created on the way. What is at least as, if not more, important is that through frequent activity and outreach, hubs increase their visibility and put innovators in the spotlight.
Another rationale is that events create the needed ‘shaking up’, energy and momentum. Indeed, research shows that stagnation is the enemy of innovation and one of the key ways of making an organisation more dynamic is keeping it in a constant “flow” or “movement.”
7. Enable, rather than force, innovation:
Hub members need to be self-determined and empowered to take initiative. This is where innovation overlaps with grassroots entrepreneurship: hubs firmly believe that, for innovation to occur, independent individuals need to organize and then take inspired, bold decisions and risks.
Put differently, hubs provide a platform and facilitate but never push, coerce or mandate innovative activity from their members. For instance, a hub would rarely set rigid targets, but rather pursue and support emerging ideas. At the same time, taking initiative and responsibility is supported and encouraged, and role models and emerging community leaders are celebrated.
Community and shared purpose together bring motivation and courage for innovation.
Strive for creating a shared culture of community and uniqueness, which the employees feel proud to be a part of, but remember to focus your community’s efforts on a shared purpose. Otherwise, you risk creating a culture where people will like to ‘hang out’, but with little innovation coherent with your strategy.
Prompting serendipitous meetings of heterogeneous minds is more likely to yield innovative outcomes.
The potential of serendipity can be leveraged if the ‘clashing minds’ are diverse to start with. Think of heterogeneity as early as when recruiting your staff and selecting your suppliers. But then, keep in mind that heterogeneous minds will often not “voluntarily” find each other, so build channels that are comfortable and convenient.
Balancing fluidity and empowerment can help create innovation teams.
Open up team formation and encourage people to go beyond “the usual suspects” (friends, co-workers) and even outside of the organization. The available pool of potential collaborators should constantly change and get richer. But once a team and project has found itself, let it stabilize itself and “let it go”, without trying to coerce it into targets and goals. Rather, create mini-start-ups where team-leads have sense of ownership.
Dynamizing your innovation process works better when it is activated bottom-up.
How often have you participated in a corporate ‘brainstorming’ session, or worse: a ‘fun’ creativity game completely lacking the sparkle, with participants looking confused, feeling forced to think out-of-the-box? While the obvious advice is to be more creative with your innovation events, it is a good idea to empower your employees along the way. Following the example of hubs, let your people come up with ideas of events to boost your organizational innovativeness and let the employees themselves organize them.
Conclusion
Innovation hubs are still very much under-explored and should not be idealized, as they are faced with many challenges of their own. However, we argue that the world-wide emergence of hubs is a phenomenon innovation management should have a close eye on in the coming years.