The Innovation Formula. Imber Amantha

for an Australian security firm. I was in the final stages of completing my doctoral thesis in organisational psychology and was excited to enter the world of full-time office working.

      I knew little about the security industry (which was probably a good thing, as I am not sure I would have accepted the job if I had known more), but I knew a lot about human resources and the ‘people' side of work from all my studies. I was (naively) ready to transform this security firm into the best place to work in Australia. The last HRM had resigned – I didn't ask why – and my first priority was to recruit as many top-quality security guards as I could, as quickly as possible. There was no shortage of work, but there was a shortage of good staff.

      My days were mostly spent in interviews with potential security personnel. I would ask them a series of questions, evaluate their answers, and then make a recommendation to management as to whether we should hire them. Someone from the management team would then conduct a final interview and make a decision.

      I was enjoying my job, although it was a little repetitive with such a big focus on recruitment. I felt very grown up going to work in an office every day, wearing a suit (incidentally, this was the only job I have ever had where I had to wear a suit) and feeling as if I were having an impact on a relatively large security firm.

      But then everything changed. It all started as a pretty standard job interview. I was interviewing a young man – let's call him Bruce – who had applied for a job as a security guard. Bruce had just completed his certificate in security and this was going to be his very first job as a security guard. I asked him the standard series of questions, and things were going well. His answers were satisfactory and he appeared to be suitable for a role. The interview came to a close, and as I was showing Bruce to the door I noticed he was wearing an earring in his left ear. ‘Just to let you know', I said, ‘you'll need to take your earring out when you are working – earrings are a bit of a safety hazard'.

      Suddenly I found myself shoved against the wall with Bruce gripping my shoulders and shouting in my face, ‘No-one tells me what to wear or what not to wear'. He then stormed out of the office. Needless to say, my recommendation was not to hire him.

      A couple of weeks later, I was looking across our rosters to see which of my new recruits had been lined up with work already. There were a few familiar names, which was great to see. But then my heart skipped a beat. Bruce's name was on one of the rosters. I immediately stormed into my manager's office.

      ‘Why is Bruce on our roster?' I practically shouted.

      My manager, Brendan, looked confused. ‘Because we hired him', he said.

      ‘Well, that's obvious – but don't you remember what Bruce did? He assaulted me in the interview.'

      ‘Yes', Brendan said. ‘But aside from that, he seemed very good.'

      I handed in my resignation the next day.

      I moved out of security and into advertising. My first job in advertising was as a consumer psychologist. This involved understanding why consumers behaved in the ways they did and helping brands understand how to use these insights to sell more products. Intellectually rewarding, but not particularly ethically rewarding. I worked in the Melbourne office of a multinational agency and, while the workplace culture was significantly better than at the security firm, my boss unfortunately wasn't.

      My first annual performance review is one of my clearest memories of my time at the agency. My manager had suggested we go to a café around the corner, and she was waiting for me at one of the corner tables. I was expecting a glowing review. I had worked my bum off all year and felt that I had done some great work for my clients and my teammates. I had also secured a weekly column in one of the top trade magazines where I wrote about the science of consumer behaviour – great exposure for the agency (or so I thought). So you can imagine my surprise when my boss started off my review by saying, ‘You need to cancel your column. The public focus needs to be on me – not on you. And please don't call yourself a consumer psychologist in the media, because that is not your job title'. The review went downhill from there.

      I ignored her request, and the column continued for another four years until I made the decision to retire it. Shortly after my review, I was headhunted to Sydney to work for another global advertising agency – Leo Burnett.

      They say third time's a charm, and it definitely was for me. Leo Burnett Sydney was on a high during my time there (not because of me – I just had good timing). The agency's creative work was picking up award after award, including several at Cannes (arguably the most prestigious industry awards in the world), and I was lucky enough to work under the leadership of CEO Nigel Marsh.

      My boss, Todd Sampson, loved my column. Far from asking me to get rid of it, it was one of the reasons he headhunted me. He asked me to do more writing – not less. I was given the perfect mix of freedom and support by Todd and the teams with which I worked. I felt challenged by my work on a daily basis and was intellectually stimulated by my teammates and my clients. Innovation was actively encouraged by Nigel and his leadership team and great ideas were listened to and supported.

      It was during this time that I began to really appreciate the importance of workplace culture to creative output. The culture was so vastly different from the previous two workplaces I had experienced. So when I left advertising several years later to start Inventium, the innovation consultancy I have been running for the past eight years, one of my many missions was to understand the science behind creating cultures where innovation thrives.

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      Most weeks at Inventium I speak with groups of business leaders who want to grow their organisations and who recognise that innovation is a sure-fire way to do that. And as we talk, the following question inevitably pops up: ‘How do I create a culture for innovation?' I love being asked this question, because it is an area where the latest scientific research tells us very clearly what works and what doesn't. And sadly, the right path is usually the exact opposite of the path most of those organisations are taking.

      Many leaders who have been given the directive to ‘build a culture of innovation' immediately think about the Googles and Apples of the world. Images of beanbags and table-tennis tables fill their minds, as do ‘blue-sky' workshops in far-off country retreats. However, what we know from the research is that all this is completely ineffective in creating a culture of innovation.

      As is often the case, the voice of popular culture and fad-ridden management books wins out over the voice of scientific research. Jargon-filled, densely written journal papers are harder to access than the pop-psych books filling the shelves. This book aims to remedy that – to give you a clear, practical understanding of what has been scientifically proven to create a culture of innovation. And it's got nothing to do with beanbags.

      The Innovation Formula takes you on a journey through the essence of more than a hundred scientific studies into what actually creates a culture of innovation. It looks at the impact of the individual, teams, leaders and the organisation. It tells you how organisations such as Etsy, Coca-Cola, GE and Disney are actively applying these principles to deliberately and successfully create cultures where innovation thrives.

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      Research into the field of innovation is flourishing and it's exciting, so let's get into that science right away. There's a concept within academia of the ‘hero study' – the study that other researchers in the field cite and refer to. A study becomes the hero study either because it breaks new ground in a research area, or because it brings together many disparate studies and makes sense of a lot of data. The hero study in the area of innovation culture research does the latter.

      In the 2007 study ‘Climate for creativity: A quantitative review', Samuel Hunter, from the University of Oklahoma, and his colleagues Katrina Bedell and Michael Mumford set out to understand which variables had the biggest impact on innovation culture and conducted an extremely comprehensive literature search.

      They started by looking at the general review articles that had been published, then looked through all issues of the major academic journals that focused on innovation and creativity. They then searched all of the main research databases, and then reviewed all conference programs from major psychology and management fields to identify any conference papers that had been presented on the topic but