Over the past half a decade, I have come across several
companies who were interested in either starting or reviving a languishing innovation
initiative. Unfortunately, many of them looked at the initiative as launching a
series of innovation workshops. Of course, raising awareness is an important
part of any new initiative. However, the workshop-only approach makes it much
harder to sustain the initiative. Here is an approach I call “ABCD” that in my
experience works much better.
Awareness: As
I mentioned above, awareness on “what is innovation?”, “How to innovate
effectively?”, “How to enable innovation?” certainly helps. This can be achieved through workshops and
knowledge sharing sessions. Apart from inviting internal and external experts
to share knowledge awareness can also be raised by sending communication on
useful links. Sharing of internal stories of both successes and failures may
play an important role because people are able to relate to them more. Hence,
internal blogs / presentations matter.
Bright
spot:
No new initiative gets adopted overnight. Chances are high only a few people
join it enthusiastically. In such a situation the voice of “it is not going to
work” can be high. What helps in such situations is to ask the questions: What
is working well here? And, how can we scale it? For example, if a small
percentage of employees give ideas in an idea campaign, we should go interview
these people to understand, “Why did they give ideas?” Did their boss play any
role? Was it about the reward? Or was it
more like an opportunity to do something exciting? Answers to questions might
help in scaling the initiative further.
Challenge
campaign: As part of the innovation activity, many companies
revive or establish an idea box. For a technology savvy company this could be
an intranet portal where employees submit ideas. In some places this is a
physical box or a notice board with post-it notes. A typical complaint a few
months after putting up an idea box is, “Oh, we are not getting any interesting
ideas. Most of the ideas are incremental in nature.” Incremental ideas play an important role in fostering
a culture of innovation. However, if the goal is also to get big impact ideas,
then the first step should be framing the business relevant challenges. With
these challenges a calendarized campaign can be run inviting ideas in response
to one or a few specific challenges. These campaigns not only improve the
quality of ideas but also result in inter-departmental collaboration.
Credibility of challenge campaigns rests on leadership sponsoring selected
ideas for further development. (Check out this 10-point challenge campaign checklist)
