Organizational Memory
Innovation & creativity card, MethodKit for Memory & Reminiscence
Card 27 of 66 · MethodKit for Memory & Reminiscence
  • ThemeStrategy & Direction
  • CardCard 27 of 66
  • Questions5 to explore
Strategy & Direction

Innovation & creativity

Finding, encouraging & developing new ideas

Innovation processes are among the hardest organizational knowledge to capture, and among the most costly to reconstruct.

Every organization that has produced something new has a process for getting there, even if it was never designed deliberately. Understanding that process: how ideas are surfaced, which ones get resources, how they are developed and tested, is what allows the organization to repeat its successes rather than depending on the same people to be present each time.

Creativity and innovation are often treated as too organic to document. In practice, the most valuable thing to capture is not a formula but a set of conditions: the environments, relationships, freedoms, and habits that have allowed good ideas to emerge in this particular organization.

For growing or transitioning organizations, documented innovation practices are what allow a new team to inherit a genuine culture of development rather than starting from scratch. The goal is not to bureaucratize creativity but to make its conditions reproducible.

What to capture

For this part of the company brain, what is worth writing down and keeping current. The goal is not a complete archive but a living record that new people can read and returning people can trust.

How ideas get surfaced

The actual mechanisms, formal or informal, through which new ideas enter the organization's consideration, including which channels work and which have been tried and abandoned.

Selection & resourcing

How the organization decides which ideas to pursue, who is involved in that decision, and how resources are allocated to early-stage exploration.

Notable innovations & origins

A record of the organization's significant innovations and how they came about, including what made them possible and what almost stopped them.

Current initiatives

What is being actively explored or developed right now, who is leading it, and what the criteria for success look like.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

  1. How does a good idea actually get heard and resourced in this organization?

  2. Which innovations in the organization's history were most significant, and where did they come from?

  3. What conditions have most reliably produced good new ideas here, and are those conditions being maintained?

  4. Who are the people most responsible for the organization's current innovation output, and what happens if they leave?

  5. What has been tried and abandoned in the last few years, and what was learned from those attempts?

Things to notice

  • Innovation histories tend to be told as success stories; the abandoned experiments and near-misses contain at least as much useful knowledge.
  • Innovation processes that work because of specific people are fragile; documenting the conditions, not just the people, is more useful for continuity.
  • Organizations sometimes confuse having an innovation process with having a culture of innovation; the process is documentable, but the culture requires more active maintenance.