Learning Tuesdays: Program Transcript
What Faculty Should Know About Innovation

Learning Objectives

Participants will:

  • Learn a five-step model for entrepreneurial leadership;
  • Understand how to be entrepreneurial in your work.

[Music playing]

Carolyn Mattiske:Good morning. Welcome to Learning Tuesday. I'm Carolyn Mattiske, Learning and Development Manager at the Research Foundation Central Office. I'm proud to introduce today's program, What Faculty Should Know about Innovation, and this program is actually part of the RF SUNY Center for Professional Development Program that is just beginning that empowers faculty with research leadership abilities. The moderator of today's program is SUNY Center for Professional Development Academic Programs Manager Dr. Chris Price, and he is in our Viking Studios in Troy, New York.
We'll get to him in just a moment but I do want to introduce Dr. Lily Cushenbery, who is a professor here at Stony Brook University. She's an assistant professor in the management program and also a director of Leadership and Creativity Research Lab, so thank you for joining us today.

Lily Cushenbery:Thanks for having me.

Carolyn Mattiske:We also have two faculty members at our Binghamton University joining us today, so we will go to their studio location a little bit later in today's program. We have Dr. Pamela Mischen, faculty advisor to the president, associate professor in the Department of Public Administration. And we also haveDr. Kimberly Jaussi, associate professor, Organizational Behavior and Leadership in the School of Management.
The panel will address as many of your questions as they can today and I encourage you to ask them, so you can submit questions in two ways. You can either use the chat feature right through Livestream or you can e-mail your questions to , and that information will appear at the bottom of your screen periodically throughout the program, so please, as questions come to mind, chat them and you can also interact with the full audience using the chat feature as well, so chat your questions, e-mail your questions, and we will direct them to our presenters today.
So with that, I will turn it over to Chris Price at Viking Studios to begin today's program. Thank you, Chris.

Chris Price:Thanks, Carolyn. I'm sitting in your seat that you probably typically sit in for Learning Tuesdays and hopefully I do a good job in your place today. So Carolyn did mention our Research Leadership Professional Development Program. There are four components to the program. Today we're going to talk about innovation but we also will have programming around commercialization, publishing, and grant writing. If you go to the Center for Professional Development's website, you can find a list of other events especially around grant writing. We have courses around grant writing.
The purpose of the program is to help faculty and staff learn about research, the competencies that they need to be effective researchers. It's designed to support SUNY's strategic plan with regard to research and it is applicable to all disciplines and all institutions types. Whether you're at the university center or a community college, hopefully the programs will be something that you find helpful and useful.
Today we're going to learn a number of things from our esteemed panel of colleagues at Stony Brook in Binghamton. We're going to learn a little bit about innovation as a field of study, awareness of what's important to know about innovation, and then some misconceptions around innovation. We'll clear those up. We'll learn about how mistakes can be a driver of innovation and we'll learn about things going on at SUNY, specifically at Binghamton, around innovation in teaching and learning, and then finally, hopefully you'll be persuaded by the end of our session today that sharing resources will benefit all of us when it comes to research and innovation.
All right, so that's all I have and now I'm going to turn it back over to Stony Brook and Dr. Lily Cushenbery.

Lily Cushenbery:Good morning, everyone. I'll be talking a little bit about research and innovation and some of the best practices that we know from the research to help you be a little bit more innovative in your faculty position. I'm Dr. Lily Cushenbery. I am an assistant professor of management in the College of Business at Stony Brook University and I also direct the Leadership and Creativity Research Lab. So I guess Chris is going to be helping me advance the slides, so you'll be hearing me say next a few times. It's part of the innovativeness we're trying to bring to you.
So we'll start with the first slide. So today I'll be talking a little bit about the definition of creativity and innovation. Sometimes people don't quite know what it means to be innovative. We'll talk a bit about what we know about the creative individual and you might recognize a few of those things in yourselves. We'll discuss the barriers for innovation which is especially important for faculty who are leading new research frontiers and coming up with new research ideas as well as practices in the classroom, and then we'll also discuss from the research what are some of the best practices that you can use. Next.
So we'll begin with what is creativity? So when we define creativity, it's really about generating ideas and solutions that are both novel and useful. So for example, I could say, "Hey, everyone. Let's all sit on the tables today instead of the chairs." Right? So that would be something new. We haven't done that before but what purpose would that serve? We wouldn't actually call that creative because it doesn't have that serving of a purpose that's necessary for us to define it as creativity. So in order for something to be considered creative, it has to be something new, something that causes us some sort of prize, but it also needs to be something that serves a purpose or something that's useful to us in some way. Next.
Now in order for us to use those creative ideas, we need to implement them, so we might create a new product or the process and actually make that idea come to life. In that case, we would then call that innovation. Now innovation can be both a product and a process and often one will result in more innovation than the others. So for example, we have the assembly line from Henry Ford. That helped us produce more cars and then when those cars came to mass market, those ended up helping to refine the assembly line process. So when we think of innovation, it's not necessarily just a thing that we're creating, and for many of us in research and in teaching, often we innovate on the processes, making them more efficient and allowing us to be even more creative with the products that we then produce.
Now this brings us to trying to understand who would be more creative. Now for research teams, we want to pick out the students, or those research assistants, or other faculty that we want to work with to try to understand how we can create this really great, creative team, and so we might want to look for some of the things that help somebody be more creative. So who's more likely to be innovative? Now this is all from the research. So if you think about people that you've known that are creative, would you consider the expert or the novice to be more creative? And what we find from the research is that it's really the expert, so there's two general types of expertise. There's demand specific and kind of a more broad expertise and both are really important for innovative performance.
Sometimes people think that the new person that comes on the scene is going to have all of these really great ideas but in reality what we find is that it takes a lot of knowledge to understand where the problems are in the field and therefore the expertise is really useful to help us come up with ideas that are not only new but also useful as part of that definition for creativity.
Also, sometimes people wonder if being really intelligent might limit us in coming up with new and creative ideas, but what we actually find is that intelligence is a big predictor of innovation, so part of innovation is solving problems and intelligence allows us to do that, helps us kind of consider how to best combine information and how to really see what the best way to solve a problem is.
Also, a big part of innovation is motivation, so we know from much of our research that motivation is really important for solving problems and so managers often ask what is the best way to motivate a creative individual and what we find is that the intrinsically motivated person tends to be the one that can really overcome a lot of those failures and sometimes when managers make too many extrinsic motivation types of programs, so in other words, they give too many rewards like money or promotions, et cetera, that can actually de-motivate intrinsically motivated individuals that are creative.
And then finally, we ask what kind of personality is involved in being an innovative person. Now this is the part where you might think about yourself and how you interact with people, but what we find from the research is actually a little bit a mix. So for example, some research actually suggests that innovators have this really direct or even kind of forceful personality profile, that they tend to be somewhat aggressive, and dominant, and they're maybe people that you wouldn't want to hang out with for long periods of time.
So perhaps the very famous example of this is Steve Jobs, who's very well known for yelling at his subordinates and having really high standards for his work. Much of this can actually end up causing him to act in these really aggressive ways. But even scientists aren't immune. So Thomas Edison, for example, whenever he was trying to persuade people to use his form of power rather than other sources of power, he actually famously started electrocuting animals in the street. So people with these big ideas tend to really believe in them and sometimes that can cause them to act in ways that aren't always socially acceptable to others.
So this actually was impetus for one of my own research studies along with Dr. Sam Hunter at Penn State, and we were curious about whether jerks really are more creative. So again, the research suggests, and this is from a meta-analysis, creative individuals tend to have a lot of these sort of negative traits like arrogance, hostility, very high self-confidence, a need for autonomy, low levels of agreeableness or what we call being a jerk, or willingness to upset norms to be heard, low levels of commonality, and just generally it's a person who just doesn't care about making a good impression. Now many of these traits are really necessary when you think about how much it takes to get an idea through and to convince other people that an idea is really important, you're gonna have to face a lot of barriers, and if you're someone who's really sensitive to the opinions of others, it's gonna be hard for you to do that.
But we were kind of sitting around and thinking, "Well, we've met a lot of creative people who actually are really nice, so surely that's not something that you have to have in order to be creative and innovative." So we had this theory that perhaps agreeable people might have really good ideas but they're just a little less likely to voice them because they're nice people, they care about the opinions of others, and so maybe they're thinking all of these really great thoughts but they're just worried that they're gonna be judged by the people around them.
So our recent studies actually showed that jerks might be more likely to get their idea heard but they don't necessarily have more original ideas. So we put people in groups. We asked them to develop an idea on their own and write it down and then we had them come together in groups and we could actually see the extent to which those individual ideas transferred to the group idea. So we found that the nice people did have just as good of ideas as the less nice people or what we call people low on agreeableness, but when it came to that group transfer variable to see who actually got their idea in the final products, it tended to be the less agreeable people who were probably more assertive with their ideas and those are the ones that got their ideas heard.
But what we also found in another study, a follow-up study, is that if the group was nicer, so if we had kind of a more agreeable group, then the agreeable people were just as likely to have their ideas used, so that means that the environment actually matters quite a bit for creativity. So speaking of environment, many of the barriers to innovation actually come from the environment and as leaders for innovation or as managers of research labs and classrooms, these are really important for us to understand in order to prevent them.
So one of the things that we know, and this is actually kind of sad, is that people tend to be biased against original ideas and they prefer safe or low-risk ideas instead. Now we see this when we have a new product come out and it's basically the same as an old product but just slightly different. We call that incremental innovation and people tend to be a lot more comfortable with incremental innovation than what we call radical innovation. So if an idea is really new, that makes people a little bit nervous.
So that means that convincing other people to accept a creative idea is pretty hard and you have to have an individual that's really willing to persuade other people of their ideas even if there is a negative outcome. Negative outcomes in the work environment include things like evaluation apprehensions, so people who are really concerned about what their boss is going to think about them, if they're concerned about whether or not they'll get promoted or get accepted by their group. Nobody wants to be that weird person at work that's yelling out ideas that no one agrees with and so that tends to prevent innovation from happening especially when people are generating ideas in groups.
And because of this evaluation apprehension, sometimes people feel like it's not really worth it to propose a new idea and it's actually easier to go the safe route. So rather than proposing something new, and risky, and being judged by it by people around them, often when we get together in groups, we all just discuss the things that we all kind of know and agree on rather than the things that are unique to each of us and the expertise that we all bring to the group.
Another concern for employees is that they worry that other people will steal their ideas. So in my own research and my consulting experience, one of the things that people often express is that they might say a new idea in their environment, in their work environment, but not only does that idea not necessarily go anywhere but maybe somebody else will take credit and that's really frustrating for someone who really believes in their idea and somebody who cares a lot about getting that idea implemented, or again, maybe they say that idea and often people have this experience that nothing really happens to it, that it kind of grinds to a halt and they don't necessarily get the support that they need from their organization in order to see that idea through. And if you have several experiences like that in a row, it can be frustrating to continue to try to be innovative despite all of those risks and barriers and we see that people kind of develop this learned helplessness to proposing new ideas.
All right, so this kind of brings us to some of the research on what you can do in order to prevent these barriers and to really create the environment that is necessary in order for people to be creative. Now one of the things that we know is that creativity, although there are some personality differences and we can assess general creative ability, but it tends to stretch like a rubber band. So similar to intelligence, we are born with a set point of creativity but we can stretch like a rubber band to the environment that we're in. So if we're in a very supportive environment, we can be more creative. If we're in an unsupportive environment, that will probably encourage us to be less creative.
And genetic studies actually suggest that genes determine only ten percent of the variability in creative potential, so really there is a lot of room for development and it really goes to show that the environment matters a lot and we know that leaders and managers are the people that shape that environment. So one of the things that you can do as a leader is develop what we call a psychologically safe environment. So psychological safety allows us to feel like we can express ideas without other people kind of judging us or making us feel bad for those ideas, and this doesn't mean that you have to say everyone's idea is great because we know that that's not really true, right, and we've all had this experience where we're in a group and somebody comes up with this sort of terrible idea but what you need to be careful of is the way that you approach that person's idea, because if you shoot that one down what that signals to everybody else is that when we say something, that we're gonna get judged for it.