You’d think that those special innovation circles, you know the ones who meet in the cool room with all the post-its and wonderful diagrams and creative design on their special walls are the solution to an innovative company. They’re not, in fact closed circles are detrimental to an innovative mindset and create dissonance, mistrust and lack of engagement around the (imperfect) innovation created by that team.

Open circles is what create the most fertile ground for the best and most implementable constant state of innovation. The kind of innovation that is actually useful to the positive present and future of the organisation and specially to the audience it aims to serve.

You really want to avoid an “insider” / “outsider” set of views and interactions. You want circles to be as wide as possible to capture as much of what lies outside the circle as possible.
You want that new trend, that new need, to be seen, captured and used by the organization and that will never happen if you close yourself into exclusive, inner or upper circles.

You want as wide a circle to be involved, to bring in complexity and often clash of ideas, not small circles who agree and probably send the organization in an agreeable but wrong direction.

Moreover you want to connect. Not exclude.
You want an innovative mindset to permeate every single corner of the organization, you want to bring everyone in. You want as many people as possible involved in the creative process to then allow the implementation process (where innovation most usually fails) to be made by fully engaged co-creators of the decisions taken.