“To the extent that creativity is about the recombination of existing ideas, then combining ideas that haven’t been connected before creates the potential to produce something new and useful.” –Roy Chua, assistant professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School.

Chua is talking about the importance of collaborating creatively with people from other cultures.

Research finds that innovation only results when there is a high level of affective trust.

…”cognitive trust,” an intellectual appreciation of another person’s skills, abilities, and reliability; and “affective trust,” an emotional belief that another person has one’s best interests at heart.

I have no research to back this up, but I bet affective trust is just as important to people with the same cultural background, but other differences, such as gender.

Over the decades I’ve talked with thousands of people and none of them were willing to take a risk or show their vulnerabilities to someone they didn’t trust, whether boss, colleague or spouse.

Finding ways to measure and improve affective trust in your organization will provide a sound foundation for creating a culture of innovation.

Flickr image credit: PhillipC

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2012 at 1:15 am and is filed under Culture, Ducks In A Row, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: culture of innovation, innovate, trust, trust level
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.