What’s the secret to fostering Canadian innovation?

I was walking around a conference for startups yesterday and everywhere I looked, there were young guys dressed in what I like to think of as innovation garb: snazzy blazers with crisp dark jeans, unbuttoned shirt collars and lots of hair gel. They might not have all been geniuses, but they wore the casual confidence of those ready to explain the value of their ideas. This is what innovation culture looks like in 2013.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that all companies start behaving like startups or implementing a dress code that forces everyone to look like Jack Dorsey or Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel. It’s obviously not that simple, as a report from the Conference Board of Canada this week attempts to show. In ‘Culture and Innovation: The Secret Sauce,’ Michael Grant and Hope Shamonda explore the different ways organizations pursue economic or social value through new ideas, as well as the cultural characteristics. In particular they reference a set of three different models that tend to define the kinds of innovative companies out there. These include technology drivers, need seekers, and market readers:

Technology drivers are focused on both disruptive and incremental innovation, usually of products. They seek to address the unarticulated needs of customers through their innovations. Apple is a good example of a technology- driver style company. Market readers focus on value creation through incremental innovations as “fast followers.” They want to get new and less expensive products quickly into the mass market, including new markets—both domestic and international. Samsung is a good example of this. Finally, need seekers are those that engage with outside stakeholders like customers, suppliers, and other industries to generate solutions to their needs. IBM is a good example of a company that evolved over time from a technology-driven company to a need-seeker company.

If all this sounds a little too Malcolm Gladwell, that’s okay. Culture is something that gets influenced by many things, and tends to arise organically rather than something you can artificially engineer. (Even though I suspect there are some managers out there who say things in meetings like, “We need to be more like Apple!”) Maybe the bigger problem is that we spend too much time treating the technology vendors like role models, when in fact, they are a lot different than the customers they serve.

Unless you’re a big bank or major retailer, you probably don’t have a fraction of the R&D budget, staff or other resources these firms devote to pursue innovation. For the vendors, being perceived as innovative is a major part of their branding. For those in manufacturing or professional services, the key attributes may be thinks like reliability, quality of support or price. No one cares how innovative you are if what you sell is too expensive or too difficult to support.

I recently hosted a roundtable discussion about innovation with a group of technology executives from a wide range of firms, representing consumer products, health care, travel and more. The consensus they reached was that for non-technology firms, innovation was incremental and something that ebbed and flowed over time, just as corporate culture is never fixed but constantly evolving. The best comment came from an executive who told me, “What we’ve realized is that the best way to think about innovation is not to think of it as a ‘what’ but a ‘how.’” In other words, it’s not constantly trying to dream up the secret sauce. It’s the way you spread it around.