Future-proofing: A workshop with innovation leaders

Last week I facilitated a workshop Future-proofing: Making innovation engine fire and sustain held at Royal Orchid Park Plaza, Bangalore. We had 14 leaders from 9 organizations exploring together the topic of systematic innovation and how it can be operationalized.

We started with the question – Can we do to innovation what TQM did to quality? That means, can we systematically become better at managing innovation? Related to this broad question, we collectively thought of questions like:

• How to create an environment of innovation?
• Are there any systematic steps for innovation?
• How do we predict timing of ideas?
• How to identify innovative people?

We tried out Pain-Wave-Waste technique of sourcing ideas and we looked at how big ideas come about e.g. we looked at a story of creating a prepared mind and asked a question: Can we cook big ideas systematically? We looked at AdSense story and explored how we can bring experimentation to the heart of the innovation process. We looked at 4 types of risks every innovator should be aware of and how we can apply cost-impact matrix to select ideas. Finally, we also looked at how we can systematically create innovation sandboxes (additional examples: dynamic innovation sandbox, Tata Nano through sandbox lens).

At the end, we felt that each of us could start with a few steps in our respective organizations and make some progress step-by-step.