How can your organisation be more innovative?
Where are you today?
How would you describe your innovation effort to an outsider?How much of your collective knowledge and brain power is utilised?
Do you involve any external stakeholders?
How are you going to create your next competitive advantage?
Is it an ongoing initiative?
There are many types of organisations and there are also many ways they can innovate. Innovations can be centred on your products / services, processes, structure, relationships and strategy. Whatever the focus you will need to follow an innovation process. A project is not sufficient. It has a definite lifespan and whilst its neatness and tidiness might initially appeal an organisation should be looking to sustain its innovation effort in order to provide an evolving competitive advantage.
Innovation is a hot topic currently. Virtually every organisation trumpets innovation's importance to them but the reality is often very different. Why is that? In time management terms innovation often falls into the "important but not urgent" quadrant. This is potentially a tragic perceptual error. Every commercial entity should be striving for the holy grail of profitable growth. Growth will occur through the acquisition of another company or through innovation. Leaving the former to the financial experts we can see that the whole company can be engaged in identifying ways to innovate. This, as mentioned above, can be in many areas but also importantly it can be in finding ways of cutting costs which clearly helps in the profitabilty aspect.
Before we look at the innovation process itself bear this in mind. Employees appreciate the need to innovate and will rise to the challenge if helped correctly. However, a bad system will always defeat a good person. Let's look at how you can fully engage your team and indeed capitalise on your very own extended team.
What do you need to do?
image by Jeffrey Baumgartner; reproduced with permission from www.jpb.com
So assuming we appreciate the vital importance of "doing innovation". What is needed?
Many people think innovation starts with the generation of ideas but we should go back one stage further. How we frame the innovation challenge is vitally important. There is normally a headlong rush into generating ideas but if the challenge statement doesn't identify the correct problem or opportunity then it is irrelevant how good those ideas might be. The recently departed Arthur VanGundy's book "Getting to Innovation" provides an excellent guide to the process of challenge framing and I'd strongly recommend it to anyone involved in the innovation process.
Whilst every organisation is different the principles behind its innovation process apply to all. It should be encouraging (and orchestrating) all its employees to participate, share and collaborate. It should be capitalising on people's different ideas, skillsets and viewpoints. It should be establishing the kind of community that facilitates conversations in which creativity can flourish. It should recognise that innovation is cumulative - once an idea is shared it will be enhanced by the contribution of others.
For best results we require a system that posts a time-framed challenge to all employees. This is very different from any kind of suggestion box where at any stage, anyone can post any idea, on any subject! This non-engaging, focus-lacking, random process should be abandoned now that superior methods exist, especially now we have the catalyst for innovation known as the internet. Ideas must be captured and shared enabling everybody to collaborate on, and feel ownership of, their development. But why restrict ourselves to just employees? Any stakeholder could be invited into the system to contribute their unique perspective. This opening up of your innovation process can extend all the way through suppliers and clients to customers and indeed non-customers. Your innovation team can be as large as you see fit.
What do you do with all your ideas?
Now we enter the phase that really is unique to each organisation and their sector. The selected ideas need to be tested and developed even further. We should be producing many iterations of prototypes and feeding all learning back into the process. Prototypes bring a possible solution to life and will enable testers to provide much better feedback.
If we reach the point of having an innovation that is ready for launch then again there will be unique factors impacting on how this is done. Again, if small, discrete markets can be targetted then it may make sense to conduct a soft launch before hopefully going ahead with the full launch to market.
What do you do next?
What we've explored is how the innovation process can be managed. The above constitutes "Innovation Process Management" and the best exponent of it I know of is a company called jpb. Their site at www.jpb.com will cover this subject in great detail and is worth a visit. The flagship in their innovation portfolio is a web application called "Jenni" which provides all of the elements described and more besides.
Related Lenses
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Web Tools for New Product Innovation
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The Internet has become a powerful resource for any innovator, and there are a variety of online tools available to help you with various stages of the innovation process.
by TheIdeaHunter
I am The Idea Hunter and my passion is helping people have ideas and helping organisations to innovate.
Everything starts with an idea... (more)
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