Here is an intervention from Fons Trompenaars giving some ideas about influence of cultural characteristics on innovation. Many intersting ideas are reported below.
The failure of the bipolar thought
In western countries, the education doesn’t help to be innovative. Trompenaars identifies one specific reason to this situation : a bipolar way of thinking. Most of the time, western people consider the problems with only two opposite alternatives (something is either black or white, good or evil, conservative or progressive…). We even try to justify these choices by giving opposite reasons (either an organization is centralized to get scale savings, either it is multipolar to be flexible and close to consumers).
But the world become more and more diverse, and our technologies and education don’t help us to catch this diversity that makes the world even more different. « Innovation is a matter of combination »
For instance, one considers that a car can either be sportive and fast, either safe. That is, if you add more speed, it will be decreasing safety. This is a bipolar thought : « You cannot add values because values are not things that can be added to each other ». The innovation will come from the sum of these values, in this case speed and safety. The art of innovation is in the combination of values that seems oposite to each other.
Use contradictions
One example applied to HR is about the prime to reward the team or the person. If you stay in this alternative you don’t solve the problem. One solution, by combinating the ideas, would be to give a prime to the team with the best individual creativity and to the person with the best team spirit… and therefore to create a spirit of coopetition.
Another interesting idea is to remember to never stay balanced, because the balance is the neutral zone of the bipolar zone, the dead zone of activity, the point zero of the combination. Always integrate rather than balance.
