‘ Being creative means having a deep knowledge about anything that you do, because this helps you then to connect those things into new things.’
Innovation. You can’t sit through a corporate meeting without hearing the word. Everyone thinks they know what they mean by it, and most people are confident that it’s someone else’s responsibility. There’s a department for that, right?
In fact, Barbara Salopek, argues, innovation is a responsibility for every employee, whether they like it or not, because the deep knowledge required is distributed throughout the business; the ‘innovation muscle’ has to be built both top down and bottom up throughout all three levels – individuals, teams and the entire organization.
She also makes the case that innovation is far broader than most people think: not just shiny new product development (expensive) but also incremental internal process improvements (efficient). Building that kind of innovation culture takes long-term commitment, and it also demands that leaders pay attention to building psychological safety, not just brainstorming.
And if you’re grappling with your own business book, you need to hear about Barbara’s structured approach to conquering what can seem like an insurmountable task.
Barbara’s site: https://barbarasalopek.com/
Barbara on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-salopek/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Link for submitting your clip for Episode 500: https://bit.ly/45RfpdY
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Barbara Salopek, who is CEO of Vinco Innovation AS and adjunct lecturer at BI Norwegian Business School. She’s an internationally recognized innovation expert, and over her career, she’s helped organizations secure over a hundred million Norwegian kroner in funding across multiple industries.
And she’s the author of Future Fit Innovation: Empowering individuals, teams, and organizations for sustainable growth.
So first of all, welcome Barbara. It’s lovely to have you here.
Barbara Salopek: Thank you Alison. It’s a pleasure to be here and especially after I have been listening some part of the, a great number of the episodes as well. Yes.
Alison Jones: There are quite a few, aren’t there? Yes. I’m not going to apologize for that, but it’s a bit of a back list. Yes.
So, let’s talk about innovation. It’s such a sort of an uncritical buzzword, isn’t it, oh, we need to be more innovative.
Let’s remind ourselves why it matters. And also let’s have a chat about where the responsibility for it lies.
Barbara Salopek: Yes, innovation is really a buzzword that everyone likes to use and as our colleague Tom Pullen says in his book as well, it’s like sprinkles that you put on every cake. So everyone who uses innovation also thinks that it adds value to everything that they do. Which delays the value of innovation itself.
But innovation is extremely important as you asked, for several reasons. And it enables you to stay relevant to the market.
It enables you in the two main ways. One, if you are innovating within your internal processes, making them more efficient so you’re saving money, right? Or it enables you to stay around in the market that you are launching products and services that are relevant for your customers because also demands, customer demands they change over time and what was maybe in and needed a decade ago doesn’t have to be today. And technology changes, the circumstances and context changes. So you have to keep up with that.
And innovation means coming up with new ideas, new products and services that fit to the market and that actually are valuable to customers or people buying them.
Alison Jones: We’ll come up to responsibility in a second, and it’s really interesting that you talk about internal innovation and external because I think most people immediately go to the kind of external new products, blah, blah, blah. But actually that process, that kind of continual innovation of process.
And what I noticed you say there was that saves money. And I think that’s a really interesting point because so often when leaders think about innovation, they just see a money pit opening up in front of them, don’t they, with no secure revenue coming from it. So that’s an interesting take on it, is that if you’re not innovating, you are missing opportunities to save as well as future potential revenue.
Barbara Salopek: Yes, and also when we talk about innovation, everyone talks about the breakthrough innovation, the big ones, and everyone is also forgetting the small incremental innovation when you improve products by year, or making it much more easier to use. So I think all the levels of innovation are important.
We cannot forget one part, and especially we cannot forget this internal part and you are getting more efficient and how you’re getting more efficient and this connects with the creativity that I’m writing about the book. When you have employees in your company they have all been working there for a while and they have some certain deep knowledge about their expertise.
And I believe that creativity means creating new things. And we have different types of creativity. One is artistic, to paint, to be a musician. We have scientific creativity, which is having a deep knowledge about something. But actually I think that being creative means having a deep knowledge about anything that you do, because this helps you then to connect those things into new things and employees at the work place, if they have been working there for a while, they have deep knowledge about their expertise in this field.
And then if they are able to get out of this fixedness, functional fixedness that I also talk about in the book. Then they can combine it in new ways and they’re creative, and then we go back to their responsibilities.
So I think that everyone’s responsibility is to be creative and innovative then in the end. But it’s always, always people look at the creativity, or innovation as its responsibility either of the department or one person or a few persons, and it’s important to have someone who is focused on that, but I think that every employee should have responsibility for it.
And it’s not easy to roll this down to every single employee. Especially for example, if you have 500 or 1000 employees, it makes quite a challenge. So that is much more reasonable to have this is the department, they do it everything and we all forget about it. But then you are missing all the deep knowledge other people have, all the important things they can contribute. And it’s very difficult to put all efforts or responsibility only on few persons.
And then those few persons have difficulties to sell it throughout the whole company. But then I say that the innovation muscle has to be built top down and bottom up. And top down means that the top management has to understand what actual innovation embraces, and it’s not a sprint and it’s not two days workshop. It’s a long term run, like when you’re writing a book, you think you’re finished, but you have to run, you have to continue running after you run that first part of the marathon, you have to continue. So it’s the same with innovation. It has to take at least, I would say, five to 10 years. Until you start getting the fruits of your efforts, and that’s very abstract and that’s very intangible.
And we leave from today until tomorrow and we all prefer the dollar today or pound today compared to today in 10 years time. And we all like, especially US companies, they’re very quarterly results. And then I think their responsibility has to be on the top management to understand these complexities so they can roll it down and then every employee has the responsibility to build it up. So that’s how I see it.
And then also I have in the books, in the book the three level framework because top management they’re also individuals. They’re also the group and individuals. They make groups and groups make organizations, and in each of those levels, there is individuals who shape the group who shape the dynamics.
And we know that psychological safety is shaped by the team leader. And why I have the group, not the team, because the organizations have both formal and informal groups and teams are only formal and we want to embrace also informal as group because they also have an impact, yes.
Alison Jones: And I remember that really struck me looking at your manuscript when we first started talking. That sense that you’ve got, that innovation is distributed throughout, not just throughout the organization, but throughout those kind of the dimensions of the organization. So you can have an innovative organization, you can have an innovative individual, but that point about the innovation that comes at group level, I thought was absolutely fascinating.
And that’s really where so much of the work gets done, isn’t it?
Barbara Salopek: Yes, and especially if you have this innovation processes, because you have teams that are going to brainstorm, that they’re going to bring it further, they’re going to evaluate and they’re going to refine. They’re going to make the prototypes. And in all these segments, you work in groups, in the teams and then they ask for feedback through peers, in formal and informal settings as well.
So then again, we have groups and we have individuals and they all make organizations. So everyone who is implementing innovation has to be aware of those that you have to go into the depth. It doesn’t help things on the surface.
Alison Jones: And you mentioned psychological safety just a little while ago, and let’s talk a little bit more about not just psychological safety, but that whole culture that has to be developed within an organization. What is the role of that and how can leaders create that kind of culture?
Barbara Salopek: That’s a very beautiful question because that was one of my motivation for the book as well, because everyone was talking about let’s have innovation processes in place, collecting ideas, evaluating them. But then if you have the culture that doesn’t support this innovation processes, then this will not work.
And what does this mean? The culture. Culture is behaviors, norms, and values. How we actually act, what we do every day without thinking. For innovation, we have to have certain behaviors. We have to be curious. We have to explore, we have to learn, we have to ask a question, the status quo and experiment. What if we do? And if when you are testing an idea, then you experiment, and then you also ask for feedback. If people don’t feel safe, no, I think we should try this, or maybe we should try this. Or if they are afraid of speaking up, if they’re afraid of challenging the status quo, then you don’t have the source of innovation processes that you need to have in place.
So that’s why culture is extremely important. And then again, the top leadership has to understand this depth again, of the processes. And then all the creativity happens as well, coming up with ideas, you need to have psychological safety so people speak up and how do they speak up?
They come up with ideas. It’s one way of speaking up, commenting on the ideas, giving feedback on ideas. This is all speaking up and if you don’t have this in place, they will stay silent. And of course everyone when they join the team you have this, in the beginning there is psychological safety. But when you get to know the team, then you learn whether it’s allowed or not, and then it disappears if it’s not allowed.
And I think without all those ingredients, you cannot have the successful innovation processes that you should have for the long term successful innovation. And I think all of those things are so abstract and long term that makes innovation so difficult actually for the companies to implement it.
Alison Jones: And so many leaders don’t realize that sort of culture, that psychological safety, that ability for people to speak up and feel their idea is going to be welcomed. I don’t think that comes by the accident because naturally people will wait for the most senior person in the room to speak,
Barbara Salopek: Yes. And so it’s important in that case that as a senior person, most senior person, you don’t speak, you let others speak. You don’t come because once you say your opinion that everyone it’s called anchoring, also with the prices when you’re negotiating. So then it’s anchored and everyone is on that. And that’s also functional fixedness. You just go for the known, established. So the best thing is that the senior goes out the room and leaves the people to do it themselves, and then at the end they can together discuss the ideas without knowing who said what.
But also like psychological safety is not very easy or like it’s not one dimensional. There are also cultural aspects of your country that can also influence it, for example, in Norway it’s very common to be vulnerable to say, oh, I did wrong, or, oh no I don’t know this issue. But in some other countries, that’s not acceptable.
And if you are coming from this culture where, for example, Nordic countries where it’s normal to say, I don’t know the answer to that, in the country where that is that not acceptable, then you will not build psychological safety. You will, people will not have trust in you while in the Nordics you will maybe build it.
So there are lots of context that you have to be aware, as I said, it’s not one dimensional just to, this is how we do it and it’s finished.
Alison Jones: Yes. So particularly for big organizations, for global organizations, you’ve got that kind of cultural intelligence that needs to come in with it as well. Yes. So fascinating.
And you also spontaneously made that sort of link between innovation and writing, that sort of, you finished the marathon, but Oh no, you’ve got another marathon to run.
So tell me a little bit about the writing process. How was it for you?
Barbara Salopek: At first, when I come to the idea I will write the book. I was very scared, of course, how to do it. And then as I’m very practical person, and then I was like, okay, I took one book that was a similar thickness as mine and I calculated how many words does it have?
And I divided by 365 days and I come up, if I write 360 words per day, I can finish the book in a year.
Alison Jones: Wow, I didn’t know that. That’s hilarious.
Barbara Salopek: But this 360 words, that’s one paragraph. And then realizing
Alison Jones: big paragraph.
Barbara Salopek: It’s a little bit more, it’s like this much, I think half a page
Alison Jones: 360 words. That’s more than a page of a normal sized book, honestly. Yes, it’s about 250 words per page or so.
Barbara Salopek: But okay. It’s a page and a half and
Alison Jones: it’s a page and half
Barbara Salopek: not a lot.
Alison Jones: It’s not a
Barbara Salopek: 10 pages, so you can, so I was like, Yes, I can do that.
Alison Jones: It’s probably less a page of A4 which is what you’re thinking about
Barbara Salopek: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A4, I’m thinking about. Yes. I was like, yes, I can do that. That 360, it’s not 5,000. It’s not whole chapter. And I was like, okay, that could be manageable.
And then I also made a structure. I was very structured about it. Okay. These are my chapters which were based on my TEDx talk. And then each chapter, I then structured each one and I was like, okay, introduction. Everyone can write introduction, right? And the conclusion, when you have the everything, they can also write easily conclusions. I was like those two things. I can do that.
But then the core was difficult. And then I was reading lots of…
I was reading 60 to 100 scientific papers on the topics. And then I was structuring what was the common theme for them? And I was structuring what they talked about. And I was like, picking up what I want to put in the chapter and connected it with my experience and some yes, real life things. Then I was surprised that at the end it wasn’t as difficult and scary as I thought in the beginning. So that, and it was much more easy than doing some projects to be absolutely honest.
Alison Jones: The great thing about a book is it stays written, doesn’t it?
Barbara Salopek: Doesn’t argue with you. It doesn’t contradict you. You know it’s there, you write it and everything is in the paper. They don’t say, no, I want to be written here.
Alison Jones: That’s hilarious. So did you actually manage to stick to your 360 words a day plan?
Barbara Salopek: No,
Alison Jones: Oh good. I’m.
Barbara Salopek: But I said, okay, one month I will read the articles. I read the articles, and make the structure, what they’re talking about, what’s important, what’s interesting. And then another month I will write and I was doing these things and I was working in the weekends because weekends, all holidays. Yes. I was all like, because I was working in teaching parallel to this, so it took almost three years to do everything, but like it gave me confidence when I had the structure. So it’s…
Alison Jones: yes, the structure is everything, isn’t it? And I think it’s interesting you initially had that simplistic oh, 360 words a day that’s what writing a book looks like. And actually as you get into it, you realize that writing looks like all sorts of different things. It looks like reading papers and making notes and having conversations with people.
And sometimes it looks like removing words.
Barbara Salopek: Yes. Yes,
Alison Jones: Yes. That’s so interesting. And what are you noticing now that the book has been published? How does it, how do you relate to it now?
Barbara Salopek: Oh Yes. Yes.
That’s a strange feeling.
It’s there and it, one of the surprising things is that how much work you have to do after the book is done. It’s not only, the book is not going to sell by itself, so you have to, but like you’re always focusing, let me write the book. And then once you write the book, okay, then I want this, like you are always increasing the desires, the wishes that you want to achieve with the book.
So that’s very contagious and you have to be careful okay, some things are good as they are, and you have to be very carefully using your energy on what you’re using it and how you’re using it. So in order to stay, in a kind of sane mode.
Alison Jones: What kind of response have you had from the people that you work with?
Barbara Salopek: Oh, that’s the most beautiful part. When people send you the messages and they have read and they say, oh, your book is so much better than this course that I attended here, and that’s really known institution. And I was like, okay, really, why? And then they say Yes, it’s wonderful when you get really nice feedback and when people share that it resonates with them, and that’s really most rewarding part I would say. When you have the people that the book resonates and fits with their thinking.
Alison Jones: It’s a nice reminder for anybody who’s right at the start of this, that although it feels like a very lonely process, what you are working towards is actually that connection and it’s that thing that will be of service to people and will make their lives better and will share ideas and so on.
And I think that’s a really helpful thing to hold onto as you write.
Barbara Salopek: Yes and also if anyone is writing with you, Alison, you have a wonderful community and people are helping each other and we are supporting, and it’s really some very wonderful people in your community that I’m very grateful that I get the chance to be part of it.
Alison Jones: Yes. And you are such a great part of that community, so thank you. It’s brilliant.
But yes, I think that that mitigates the loneliness of not just the writing, but the promotion as well, that the whole kind of exposure, the vulnerableness of putting the book out there. Yes.
Barbara Salopek: And sharing the learnings,
Alison Jones: Yes.
Barbara Salopek: everyone has something to share, and it helps to speed up the learning process, which is important nowadays when you don’t have time.
Alison Jones: Yes, absolutely. Brilliant.
I’m going to ask you, as I always ask my guests, for your one best tip, so somebody is listening to this, they’re at the start of the journey, what would you say to them?
Barbara Salopek: I would say to them, what I’m trying to say now, find the structure of your book. Because once you have the structure, what actually the book is about, it’ll be much more easier to write then just I want to write a book on this. Brainstorm the ideas, what is important for you to be in that book and once you have this, of course it’ll change over the time, but more or less it’ll be your guiding.
So that makes it much more easier for me because if I’m thinking to write book number two, I have only two chapters now in my head, so I’m missing six and…
Alison Jones: that’s hilarious. I didn’t know you were a quarter of the way through book two.
Barbara Salopek: It’s just in my head, I have idea for a fiction book and I have quite a good structure in my head and I don’t know if I should do that or not.
Alison Jones: It’s addictive, isn’t it? And it’s, when you were saying that about reading the journals and making the notes and I often find guests on the podcast and they have a sort of wistful, far away look in their eyes oh, I remember those days when I was deep in writing my book. And at the time they probably hated it or they thought they hated it.
But you look back now and you think, oh, that was a really beautiful time of my life when I was creating this thing that’s in the world now. Yes, it’s very easy to get wistful and nostalgic about it when you’re not actually doing it. So love that.
I always ask as well, if there’s a book that you would like to recommend us, so a book that perhaps you found useful yourself. So for its content or a book that you think is particularly well written or, yes, anything really. What would you recommend us?
Barbara Salopek: I would say two things here. First one, I would encourage everyone to buy smaller authors, like not very known like the PIP community authors , because those big ones, everyone is going to buy them. I think it’s important to support like smaller voices as well.
But here I will mention someone which the book I read was in Norwegian, Machines That Think by Inga Strümke
It’s about AI. And since we are in AI thing and everyone is talking about AI the book is about artificial intelligence and it very nicely explains how the AI has been built and what are the threats or like what are the things you should be careful about? For example the threat about AI is that when you don’t know on which variables has been built, you don’t know if you can trust the output that it’s giving you. And then the less we know about the variables, the more unsecure we can be, what actually it’s providing. So that’s one big challenge that everyone has too, and she writes in the book that European Union has to be aware of it. That’s one thing.
The second thing is like how the AI builds answers that it gives you, for example, the language models. They use chess as an example, like which next move it should give you when you are playing chess. And then the AI is trying to think what is the most probable next move you are going to make.
Or for example in the text, what the text that you provided, for example, email. This is the email I get. I want you to provide me the answer. So the AI reads it and it’s trying to think where should it be the most weight in the text? And then it provides you the answer, which is very interesting because sometimes you get answers that you don’t like, right? That you think it’s hallucinating.
But when you know this background and they just put the weight on something else that you didn’t put the weight on, so then you
Alison Jones: Because it doesn’t have the context, it doesn’t have the breadth of context that a human reader would have. Yes,
Barbara Salopek: I love that book.
Alison Jones: I don’t know the book, so yes, brilliant. And thank you. I think it’s the first time I’ve had a Norwegian author recommended, so
Barbara Salopek: I think she is Swedish, but or Norwegian. But it’s, I read in Norwegian, but it’s translated to English
Alison Jones: Yes, of course. Machines That Think brilliant. Thank you for that recommendation.
And Barbara, if people want to find out more about you, more about the work that you do, more about Future Fit Innovation, where should they go?
Barbara Salopek: Future Fit they can always find on Amazon or any other retailer or throughout the world thanks to Alison. And they can find me on LinkedIn, Barbara Salopek or barbarasalopek.com website, and then they will get all other information there.
Alison Jones: Amazing. I’ll put those links up on the show notes @extraordinarybusinessbooks.com. Thanks for your time today. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you.
Barbara Salopek: Thank you, Alison. It’s always a pleasure and I appreciate the opportunity of being here.
