BOTTOMS UP

WILLING & ABLE
WILLING: bound by common purpose, shared values, and mutual rules of engagement.
• Succeeded as a community not only because they pursued a common purpose but because they also shared fundamental values
and followed certain rules of engagement that the founding leaders established and subsequent leaders continuously reinforced
• That purpose imbues their collaborative work with higher meaning and leads them to endure the stresses and turmoil that
inevitably come with innovation.
• Members can feel safe to offer ideas and to hear criticism of their ideas because they know the goal is finding the best way to
achieve the community's common purpose
• Community building consists not only in what the leader does but also in how it's done. Every act of the leader—from working
with and respecting member organizations to structuring the ecosystem to creating and enforcing the rules that govern it—is
done to foster and sustain that fragile but all-important sense of common purpose and shared values.
• Without a sense of community—of being pulled together by common purpose, shared values, and clear rules of engagement
openly developed—an innovative ecosystem is likely to flounder. Without a leader who understands this and works diligently to
build and sustain that sense, the ecosystem will likely remain a mere collection of players who cooperate and coordinate, not a
community capable of breakthrough work.
ABLE: collaboration, discovery-driven learning, and integrative decision making
• You must create an organization in which people are able to do the work of innovation. You do that by building three
organizational capabilities essential to innovative problem solving: creative abrasion, creative agility, and creative resolution.
Many organizations won't be able to innovate routinely until they revisit their assumptions about leadership. The innovation leader's
role differs from the conventional image that many hold of good leadership. Great leaders of innovation, we found, see their role not
as take-charge direction setters but primarily as creators of a context in which others are willing and able to make innovation happen.