Argentina seems to be heading towards a model of greater market openness, but some problems from recent decades still persist; above all, how to overcome the “external restriction” and generate a positive balance of exports versus imports in the long term. Achieving this implies a greater focus on innovation, which according to international studies is a fundamental tool to improve exports in emerging economies.
Given the directly proportional relationships between risks and benefits, it is worth asking: is our country in a position to bet on innovation? It could be said yes, since despite the educational deterioration of recent years, Argentina still has what José María Fanelli calls “the demographic bonus”, that is, a young and educated population.
Education is relevant because one of the requirements for innovation is having teams that have the ability to learn. According to Hansen and Birkinshaw, the innovation value chain begins with the generation of new knowledge. Of course, an educated population does not magically generate companies that have the capacity to generate new knowledge. Otherwise, it would be enough to invest in good schools and universities to have a developed country. But we could say that education is a good foundation on which to build.
Companies need to ask themselves how they transform talented, educated people into team members who can use learning to innovate. Fortunately, this is a topic that business schools have researched in recent years and we already have some useful insights.
The most general advice that can be given is that we must form teams that take on challenges and know how to transform their successes and mistakes into more abstract knowledge. According to Chris Argyris, true learning is that in which a success or error generates a reflective process that allows us to review assumptions and generate new hypotheses to test. This means that the times and methods necessary for reflection to occur must be included within the company’s processes. Routinely taking time to review how and how successfully problems were addressed is essential to improving performance in the future.
You also have to consider what stimuli are provided to the team. The challenges inherent to the company’s reality – customer complaints, product problems, supplier problems, etc. – are just one of the sources of learning.
There is vicarious learning, which is what arises from analyzing the responses of other teams, as proposed by most business schools that use the case method. And there is learning by experimentation, in which controlled problematic situations are created: experiments are not only done in laboratories, there are also simulation situations or thought experiments that a team can develop by imagining responses to hypothetical situations. A recent paper by Harvey, Cromwell, and Edmonson suggests that forcing teams to confront these different types of learning on a regular basis can promote innovations.
One last piece of advice for companies is to force their teams to break routine. People tend to generate habits of thought and group dynamics that, in the long run, impede innovation. That’s why some experts recommend rotating team members. But perhaps this policy is not feasible or necessary, since there are alternatives to break group dynamics. Steve Jobs, for example, designed Apple’s headquarters building with a single hallway for a very clear reason: he wanted to increase the probability that his employees would cross paths, because in these causal encounters they would discuss what they were working on and receive suggestions that the experts themselves They had never thought. This type of casual chat could also encourage innovation.
In summary, maintaining incentives for learning is essential to promote innovations. When reality does not provide them, they must be created.
Associate Director of Glue Executive Search
Source: Ambito
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