Innnovation: wisdom sharing between the ages
It’s time to put strategies in place to actually harness the innovation potential. Inge van der Poel highlights how wisdom sharing between different generations of workers can help your business.
A lot has been written about innovation recently. The Financial Review dedicated a whole issue of its June edition of BOSS magazine on innovation.
You may have thought this is a buzzword and a nice to have. But clearly it’s not when the Reserve Bank Deputy Governor is talking about it too.
So why is so much attention being brought to innovation?
In a speech in March Philip Lowe put it very simply: we need to innovate to ensure Australia’s future growth and prosperity.
It is interesting to note that when we talk about innovation most people immediately talk about risk mitigation, as though the two are inextricably linked.
Mr Lowe talks about Australia’s focus on risk mitigation and risk control and how we have “been prepared to limit options or to spend more of our scare resources to reduce risk”. While this has been prudent with events such as the global financial crisis, he questions whether we have the balance right and what this means in light of an ageing, growing and diversifying population.
The RBA Deputy Governor also suggests that as our population ages, we may find ourselves remaining risk averse. But the good news is he says there are five ways [link] we could avoid this possibility – and now I’d like to suggest a sixth:
The way we value and enable intergenerational wisdom sharing.
Why is this important? Firstly, we have an ageing population and it won’t be long before we have five generations working side by side. This means there will be increasingly diverse life experiences, attitudes and desires in a work setting. This brings me to my second point. Diversity is a great source of innovation! Having a diverse workforce is not enough though. Companies need to put strategies in place to actually harness the innovation potential.
Lynda Grattan (London Business School) identifies cross-generational mentoring as one way of harnessing the innovation that can come from the creative tension between the generations. For younger people (Gen X and Gen Y) this is about learning from past experience and the wisdom that mature age workers have gathered on their journey, while for baby boomers and traditionalists it can be about learning new technologies, business models and new perspectives on the roles of work and business in people’s lives.
If you take this approach, you not only support leadership development and organisational learning, you can also use it to harness it to innovate new processes, ideas, services and products.
Organisations can also seek out young entrepreneurs, innovators and game changers externally, as well as gaining the perspective of business elders who have acquired valuable business knowledge and wisdom.
Whatever approach an organisation takes, it starts with a mindset that values diversity and leverages this by connecting the different generations for the purpose of creativity and innovation.
Inge van der Poel is the founder of Elderberry: a platform that brings together entrepreneurial spirited women, change-makers and innovators (Berries) with business elders who provide knowledge and wisdom through mentoring and services. Elderberry offers a matching service for Elders and Berries and advises companies on how to tap into the richness of the generations within their organisation.
