By Bert Zethof

These days innovation is generally seen as a key to success. It is worth revisiting a classic article in Inc. Magazine (Sept. 2003) titled "How Creativity Drives Profit: The Sundance Model can Transform Your Business."

Robert Redford of the Sundance Institute ensures that innovation happens by process and design:

- expose people to a variety of conflicting perspectives
- hire for raw ideas
- throw innovators back on their own resources
- perpetuate institutional memory
- allow for experimentation, mistakes and dead ends
- employ short term mentors
- don't respond slavishly to market research
- engage in conversations that lead to new conclusions rather than persuade people of foregone conclusions
- periodically switch environments
- as leader, give generously to innovators your time and attention
- as leader, make clear that you yourself are on a quest for the genuinely new

Note the list includes both "hire for raw ideas" and "perpetuate institutional memory," seemingly contradictory prescriptions. Redford sees value in the roles of both new hires and long serving employees. I wonder how many organizations had to sacrifice some innovation potential in the last twenty years by laying off long-time employees in the name of cost cutting even though these individuals still had much to contribute to innovation.