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5 Innovation Strategies All Organizations Can Use

Posted on August 16, 2011 by in Articles

Innovation is not merely a novelty of the high-tech industry. Innovation is a process that any organization can use for solving problems and staying ahead of the competition.

Regardless of industry (high-tech, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.), truly innovative organizations use 5 common innovation strategies: empowerment, honesty, community, goals and leadership.

Empowerment

Empowerment is one of the most critical and most difficult of the innovation strategies. Innovation is not always neat and systematic. It can be messy and slow. In order to innovate, you have to let folks get dirty and play.

Still, empowerment is not a blank check for failure. It’s an innovation strategy that must be formalized. Design boundaries so that employees have enough room to be creative but not so much room that they’re out of alignment with the organization.

Google has found a good balance with one of its innovation strategies called “20 percent time.” Basically, it means that technical employees are required — yes, required — to spend 20% of their time on technical projects of their own choosing based on what inspires them. The remaining 80% of their time is spent on core engineering projects.

Kaiser Permanente’s innovation strategy is multi-layered. The first part is an internal innovation consultancy. The consultancy’s job is simply to sit back and watch what happens inside of Kaiser. In one case, they found that nurses were being interrupted up to 17 times while trying to administer medications. After identifying the problem, they applied the second part of their innovation strategy, to include frontline employees in innovation development, and asked nurses to brainstorm about solutions. With the nurses’ help, they developed “Non-Interruption” wear, a sash to be worn over their uniforms when doing work that should not be interrupted. The result was a 50% reduction in the number of staff interruptions, and a 50% increase in the standardization of medication administration.

Honesty

As you start down the road of empowerment, you’ll need the second of the innovation strategies, honesty.

You may end up with more ideas than you can handle and some ideas, no matter how innovative, may not work. You have to be ready to identify and kill off “zombie projects.” Child psychologists say that when you keep every single picture your kid has ever drawn, it actually stifles the child’s creativity. It’s better to pull out the really great ones and discard the rest. The same strategy applies to innovation projects. Every 30-90 days, find the projects that aren’t working, kill them off and start new ones.

Community

Innovation strategy number three: Use community as a resource to spark innovation. A great technique for fostering an innovation community is to create “leadership grand rounds.” Gathering together managers from different departments (nursing, pharmacy, radiology, purchasing, etc.) for a few hours once a month to share experiences (not advice).

Procter & Gamble uses an innovation strategy they call “Connect and Develop.” Unlike Research and Develop, Connect and Develop creates research innovation through connections with the community outside of their organization. Once a year, they develop scientific briefs (based on consumer needs they are trying to fill) and take them to their network of suppliers to see if any of them have ready-made solutions. The combined R&D staff of their top 15 suppliers is 50,000 people. When they started mining them for ideas, their innovation success rate almost doubled.

Goals

All of the innovation strategies in the world won’t produce true innovation if you don’t set HARD goals (Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult; see my book Hard Goals for more). After studying organizations that use SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound), we found that, because of the “realistic” and “achievable” parts, organizations were under performing. Of the 4,000 people we studied, only 13% said they were going to reach their full potential with the SMART goal and only 15% said they were going to achieve greatness.

Set goals that force people to think ahead and have more vision. One of the things General Electric does to set HARD goals is ask all of their business unit leaders to identify the bigger trends that are shaping their particular business landscape. Then, they apply goals that are actually unachievable if the business units stay focused on the current business environment.

Leadership

Finally, in order to implement all of these innovation strategies you need innovation in management. Make sure your leaders are getting the following kinds of leadership experiences:

  • Managed ambiguous situations
  • Had to “pull the trigger”
  • Made decisions in data-poor environment
  • Found new customers

Follow these five tried and true innovation strategies, and you will create a truly innovative culture.

Is Your Culture Stifling Great Ideas From Employees?

Posted on March 31, 2011 by in Articles

Every organization wants great ideas; smarter companies generally deliver better service and make more money. But not every company does a great job of harnessing all of the great ideas lurking throughout the organization.

First, not every company truly wants to hear the ideas of its frontline employees. And second, there are many companies that say they want to hear employees’ ideas, but they design “idea generating” programs (or “bright idea” programs, or whatever) that don’t fit their unique corporate cultures, so employees never participate. We need to fix this issue.

Here’s the dirty little secret of many programs designed to elicit great ideas from employees: They’re too individualistically competitive. Many idea-generating programs reward individuals, not groups, with a cut of the profits, prizes, money, a special lunch, whatever.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way those programs are designed, IF your culture is competitive and individualistic. But many are not, and that’s the problem.

Find out what type of culture is right for your organization and how to achieve it in our upcoming webinar, “Creating the Right Culture for Your Company.” You’ll learn the 4 unique types of organizational cultures, the benefits and challenges of each, and, most important, which one is right for YOU. Click here to learn more and register now. The first 100 people to register get $50, so hurry to reserve your seat.

For example, highly entrepreneurial cultures typically have a competitive streak (the best ideas win, inventors get all the glory, etc.). Similarly, hierarchical cultures also have a robust competitive streak (whoever gets the most power, or generates the most visibility, or wins the most deals will get the big promotion, corner office, etc.).

But then there are corporate cultures that tend to squash competitiveness. For example, dependable cultures tend to focus on consistency, efficiency and protocol. You could invent the next iPad in this type of culture, but if it was created outside of the accepted protocol, the idea (and inventor) will be instantly dismissed. And finally in highly social cultures, where affiliation, getting along and social bonds reign supreme, competition is frowned upon. Great ideas are instantly attacked if they even slightly damage the culture’s social bonds (harmony is more important than a few more points of market share).

Now, if your culture is one that squashes competitiveness (especially individual competitiveness), does it really make sense to market a “bright ideas” program to employees that incents individualistic competitiveness? Wouldn’t a team-based program be better? Or one where your whole department or workgroup wins a prize if you win the competition? Or one that encourages cross-departmental collaboration? Or basically anything that doesn’t reinforce individualistic competitiveness?

And if you have a more competitive culture, you really need to make sure that the program has sufficient rewards to engage the motivational drivers of your employees. If it’s loosey-goosey and touchy-feely, it will never get adequate participation.

Ultimately, your goal is to understand your unique culture. Only then can you design a process that will encourage and capture great ideas from your brightest employees.

Find out what type of culture is right for your organization and how to achieve it in our upcoming webinar, “Creating the Right Culture for Your Company.” You’ll learn the 4 unique types of organizational cultures, the benefits and challenges of each, and, most important, which one is right for YOU. Click here to learn more and register now. The first 100 people to register get $50, so hurry to reserve your seat.

Inspire Innovation by Rewarding Risk Takers

Posted on February 1, 2010 by in Articles

It may feel like a risky time to consider rewarding risk takers. Yes, it’s tough out there, and the temptation may be to perceive risk as something that should be avoided, at all costs. Just take it steady and slow, and encourage your people to maintain the status quo. Maybe reward employees when they replicate what’s already working, but don’t dare tempt anyone to step outside the comfort zone, especially when it comes to thinking and acting.

That mindset may buy you a long lease on the status quo, which may feel safe at the moment. But when was the last time the status quo produced something exceptional? Something like the iPad, iPod, X-Box, Amazon Kindle, Google or the Human Genome Project. All great successes that arrived on the coat tails of some element of risk. Or consider the successes of some of the more famous risk takers: Bill Gates who dropped out of college to start Microsoft. Or Jeff Bezos, who quit a high-paying job to start up Amazon.com. Both of who chose to push the edge on their potential rather than settle for the status quo.

We’re not all quite as naturally gutsy as Gates and Bezos, though. Sometimes even the most talented folks need a push from a strong leader to make them take the leap and go beyond self-imposed limitations—past the lure of being just good enough. Assigning employees truly challenging or HARD goals (Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult) is one way 100% Leaders encourage this kind of innovation.

It’s your goal, and that means you’re in charge and your fingers are firmly on the controls. But by lifting the often stifling restrictions found in the typical goal (namely a requirement that it be achievable and realistic), you open your people up to a world of previously unexplored possibilities. A world where taking an element of risk can provide a big pay off. Instead of issuing a warning that says, “Hold on, don’t take too big a bite, stay within your limitations,” HARD goals send the message of, “What I propose is going to be a challenge, and I don’t have all the answers. I’m depending on your knowledge and innovation to get us there.”

Get your people feeling safe to step up to the HARD goal plate by openly rewarding employees who show incentive to take a risk: even when the result of that risk is only partial success or failure. Of course, I don’t mean foolish and wild risk. But rather real and valuable risk, where someone pushed past the status quo and tested his or her limits to try and effect something great. Create enviable heroes, workplace celebrities that people want to emulate, whenever anyone goes beyond doing what’s easy— to do what’s right.