Most discussion about innovation tends to focus on two extremes. Either innovation is about big science and product development. Or it’s about creativity and culture. Both are of course crucial, but essentially innovation is about how people work together, and how they share knowledge and ideas.

CIPD has been working with University of Bath researchers to understand how these aspects of innovation are delivered. The results are presented in a report due April 2013. Looking at issues such as cross boundary working and focusing on the sort of collaborative and integrative business partnerships that drive innovation. The CIPD have found that line managers can support and encourage innovation in terms in their organisation and were able to identify five innovation profiles.

Briefly previewing three here, there are some valuable tips for how managers can use the insights to promote innovation:

Distributed innovators make innovation part of management’s core role. They share innovation across the organisation with a big focus on this being about knowledge sharing.
Inclusive innovators encourage a high level of involvement from employees, suppliers and even competitors. They see innovation as critical and look far and wide to harness it.
Managerial innovators are more likely to focus on managers being solely responsible.

What managers supporting innovation must do:

• Train newly promoted managers, focusing on the types of development rated as effective for developing an innovation culture.
• Use job rotation and coaching amongst line managers, as well as prioritising leadership and management training and continuous learning.
• Utilise skills and break down silos by making good use of employees’ skills and competencies and encouraging them to collaborate, share knowledge and network with others. This approach is sometimes referred to as using human, social and organisational capital effectively.
• Ensure that the organisation supports the innovation approach you want to see by helping people introduce processes such as lean and continuous improvement, supporting people in initiatives even when there is some risk and giving people permission to fail productively. Productive failure means learning rapidly from mistakes and using them to inform a better solution. It worked for Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs!

The full report with six detailed case studies, as well the five full profiles, is due out in April 2013, with key segments to be released on the CIPD’s website in the coming months.