Innovation, true institutional innovation, makes indelible, positive impacts on a business’s corporate culture and ability to drive revenue. When implemented, successful innovation programs can attract top talent, improve staff retention, drive new lines of business, and create an agile organization able to adapt to changing environments.
A culture of innovation requires executive leadership to engage the entirety of their staff to take ownership of innovation development, and incorporate it into their daily job functions. Every employee has a unique view of the organization, and can identify opportunities to better serve their constituents. Identifying these gaps should be an organizational priority, because each gap is an opportunity to innovate a new program or fill a need.
These days, it is insufficient to rely on a suggestion box in the break room to drive innovation. You need to present your employees with the resources and support necessary to effect a change on the problem they have identified.
When the American Cancer Society initiated its Futuring and Innovation Center in 2002, they were inundated with ideas on how to solve constituent challenges. The Center drove a cultural change within the greater organization by developing a structure through which even the most junior staff were able to submit ideas and participate in their development. Beyond the value of the new programs, and beyond the new revenue from them, The Center fostered a culture of individual responsibility and gave every staff person the tools and opportunity to make lasting and meaningful changes to the way that the organization operated. The lesson? Encourage your employees to extend themselves outside of the prescribed job descriptions.
Additionally, Royal Dutch Shell PLC was a pioneer in organization awareness, able to engage their entire company — top to bottom level. Shell developed and implemented an innovation identification and development program called “Game Changer,” which actively sought outside ideas for energy production, distribution, and even new sources that could drive profitability and overall growth of the company. Shell calls out to its entire network asking “If you have a creative mind and you believe your invention can transform the energy industry, perhaps you should be speaking to us. We invest in novel, early stage ideas that could impact the Energy System to help you get them from your mind to ‘proof of concept.’”
But awareness need not solely be an external effort. Air Products and Chemicals considered awareness as an internal challenge. Air Products employs a vast array of engineers with diverse background and interests. However, this vast resource was not being tapped, simply because the interests and skills sets of each engineer were hidden. Air Products recognized the challenge and created an internal system to catalog all of their engineer’s technical expertise and passions. Now, project managers leverage the system to create high relevance ad-hock technical teams that align people with their technical skills and passions. The result is better products and engaged employees.
In the Innovation and Commercialization 2010 McKinsey Global Survey, one of the biggest challenges expressed by participants was the need for better organization of innovation. In fact, 42 percent of survey respondents said that improvement in innovation organization would make a profound positive impact on their ability to drive innovation.
Interestingly enough, “organization” was closely followed by “developing a culture and climate that fosters innovation” as the second biggest challenge. The report is telling when it says, “Organizational factors, including innovation-specific processes and links to support functions, remain a challenge. As hard as it is for companies to implement organizational changes in increasingly complex environments, the results suggest that when companies make the effort, they will experience more success with innovation.”
The lack of a highly functioning innovation system is one of the preeminent barriers to developing a culture of innovation. An innovation structure provides individuals with great ideas the resources and corporate support to usurp the standard business development process.
The Shell Game Changer is a strong example of how a large organization can act nimbly by creating a separate pathway for ideas to route. Game Changer relies on a stage-gate process to bring in, evaluate, validate, test, and launch new innovations. The American Cancer Society leveraged the success of the Shell system and adopted a similar framework for their innovation development program called Springboard. Both programs took a regimented and systematic approach to innovation development, passing hundreds and thousands of ideas through screens until they were left with only the most viable innovations. At which point, those ideas received not only funding, but developmental support.
Here is an easy guide for transforming all those wonderful innovations from words on an email, to actionable programs or products:
From the outside, brilliant business innovation may seem like art. But it’s more science than you think. We work in nonprofits, where innovation is the name of the game: Now, you know our strategy for success.
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