So, you want to have an organization that demonstrates an eagerness to grow and evolve, with an intense appetite to satisfy any customer’s needs. You want innovation to be “part of the DNA” of the company and are not sure where to start. This is a marathon ambition, but not an unreasonable one, so buckle up for the long haul.
Cultures are the result of the culmination of our shared experiences and values within a working group. High-performing cultures are ones where these values are highly aligned and the experiences are both consistent and positive. Cultures are easy to corrupt or contaminate. Cultures can be wrecked by a disastrous singular event or series of events. Stewarding and cultivating a culture takes both time and intentionality.
Before we begin, I want to caution you that developing sustainable cultural innovation requires organizational commitment and a focus that can only be achieved if the energy of the organization aligns around it. Therefore, innovation isn’t a pursuit to be made in secret or by edict, but rather through thoughtful and deliberate planning that can naturally cascade down the organization. It cannot be forcibly applied or suggested into existence. It should be clearly articulated in your vision and your values and routinely demonstrated by your management team.
I’ve found that there are three main significant contributing factors to making lasting innovation a foundational part of your culture. Each of these factors has an associated mode, mechanism and pipeline for innovation and ideas. Each has a slightly different person at the center of the mode in question. Allow me to explain.
The first avenue of innovation, and likely the most obvious, is the Professional Contributor. This is the person or team within the organization that is expressly paid to innovate; the engineers, the prodigies, or the proverbial whiz kids employed for the express purpose of generating ideas for the organization. However, job description and work ethic alone won’t maximize their innovative output. Intentional cultivation requires more. This is a very small group of people. Consider:
- Crafting appropriate monetary intellectual property incentives to encourage enthusiastic participation (rewards for patent applications, journalistic articles, developing trade secrets, or experimental discoveries).
- Developing Kata groups to routinely stretch frontiers of knowledge or spur experimentation.
- Forming official Moonshine teams to bring rapid prototyping and testing to bare coupled with traditional R&D.
The next, often overlooked avenue to develop is the general worker, which I refer to as the Everyone Contributor. Each individual holds tremendous potential for ideas and problem solving but we often relegate them to their “day job” though they have much more to offer – IF we can only tap into it. This group – the largest group, by the way – is fragile and will usually withdraw from participation if they feel unappreciated, taken for granted, or have had poor experiences in the past with suggestions. These bad experiences might even be attributed to other companies, TV, or their home life experience. Nevertheless, we in leadership have to be the ones to invite their participation and be consistently open and eager to new ideas in order to gradually win them over. Here are some tips for engaging the Everyone Contributors:
- Deploy a simple suggestion system that can process ideas quickly and give sincere and timely feedback builds loyalty and trust.
- Roll out a robust Rewards and Recognition program that highlights and celebrates the contributions of individuals.
- Coordinate a formal kaizen program builds problem solving skills in individuals and grows those skills through the population.
- Commit to using 3P when introducing new products or processes to engage the workforce directly in the growth activities of the business.
There’s one final, and critical group that you can’t afford to neglect when developing innovation capabilities in your organization; Volunteer Contributors. These individuals are simply intrinsically innovative. Their day jobs could be in the engineering camp, the general workforce, or even support areas that normally get forgotten, like HR, IT, or maintenance. You can’t afford to forget about these people. They breathe the entrepreneurial air and are naturally wired to learn, try new things, grow, and adapt. I’ve seen some great mechanisms over the years to try and engage with this valuable resource. Here are a few things to consider:
- Expand the suggestion program to include the novel as well as the normal. Add prizes as well as recognition to the outside-the-box ideas. Invite the weird and the wild.
- Host intense annual competitions around specific objectives or to develop different concepts. Let the company vote on the winners and pursue winning ideas with abandon. Be sure to share the IP with the innovators.
- Launch a makers-space lab or creative workroom that can be used to incubate ideas both and off the clock. Staff the space with professionals, 3D printers, model-making tools, and such to help people bring personal ideas to life. This expense can pay huge dividends and builds tremendous good will.
- Reserve actual work time for individuals to pursue ideas, projects, and competitions. Your company will benefit when it helps people actualize their dreams and then can share in their triumphs.
I have seen the competitive advantage that comes with leveraging a holistically innovative workforce. It fundamentally changes the trajectory of an organization, impacting both the culture and the capabilities. But it can’t be done without first harnessing the potential of all three creative resource types. How will you move closer to your vision of an innovation dynamo?
Lean in, and Lean on.