Increasingly, innovation is seen as a key to survival as libraries seek to reposition and rebrand themselves.
But who leads innovation? What do successful innovators look like? How do you develop a culture of innovation?
Five Habits of Mind
In The Innovator’s DNA, Harvard researcher Clay Christensen suggests that there are five habits of mind of innovators:
- Associating (why do the delivery trucks leave in rush hour? Wouldn’t shelvers be more productive when the library was closed? What does queuing theory have to teach about circulation lines? Why aren’t student assistants knowledgeable enough to answer questions about the catalogue?);
- Questioning (why this way? Have we thought of that way?);
- Observing (how do out customers approach this? What are they doing? What are their questions? How can we study them more effectively?)
- Networking (what could social planning teach us about trends? What could transportation teach us about delivery patterns? What did our staff bring back specifically from that conference that we should consider?)
- Experimenting (what are our current experiments? How are our pilot studies evaluated? Is one of our branches an incubator for ideas?)
Connect the Unconnected
Innovators excel at connecting seemingly unconnected things.
How does this happen? Individuals who have lived in other countries appear to be more innovative. Individuals who are “T-shaped” (depth in one area but breadth in many) are also more innovative.
It would be interesting to hear from library leaders where the LIS education program consciously inspires innovation, where the system hires for innovation, where innovation is included in performance appraisals, where experimentation is carried out and rigorously evaluated, where partnerships with LIS schools encourages innovation in the field.
Leaders of course model these behaviors, through their hiring practices, through own networking and naming the sources of their ideas, from asking what was learned at a conference or workshop that we should try (and why), from asking managers what is frustrating then right now, what they are reading, what we could be doing differently and better.
Innovation is everyone’s responsibility. Developing strategic thinking and a culture of innovation, however, belongs to leaders.
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