How can you maintain your innovation process? Below are some suggestions to get you thinking – most should apply to most companies. Compiling the initial list is easy – doing it is the hard bit!
- Establish the importance of innovation for your organisation and its role in the overall strategy
- 100% commitment from management – support, encourage, demonstrate, walk the walk
- Integrate innovation into organisation’s culture
- Facilitate open communication at all levels – How is it working? What else could we be doing?
- Establish practical metrics for performance: non-perfect is better than none at all
- Recruit the right talent: open-minded, flexible, passionate, questioning, diverse backgrounds
- Set up access to fresh perspectives: customers, stakeholders, non customers, etc
- Provide creative thinking training for your people
- Set up an idea management system to solicit, capture and evaluate ideas (my fave – jenni)
- Involve your customers / consumers (open source collaboration)
- Look at “best practice” in model companies (Nokia, Apple, etc) to devise your own “next practise”
- Set up project teams that tap into your organisation’s diversity (can you use external resources?)
- Give time and permission for experimentation and allow failures
- Set up a slush fund for innovation
- Consider skunkworks if size and nature of innovation will struggle within the parent organisation
- Recognise (and reward?) people’s efforts
- Work in cycles to maintain focus and the flexibility to review and refine
- Innovate the innovation process: How could we do things differently?
April 30, 2008 at 1:25 pm |
To many steps!
Good lord how would anyone follow all of these steps? 100% commitment from management? Thats crazy talk! Management is looking for the next bonus and maintaining their job which I assure you isnt measured on how innovate some people in another group are.
I think your suggestions are spot on buy they are clearly impractical in an entrepreneurial context and counter to the corporate context.
April 30, 2008 at 3:04 pm |
It certainly would be a challenge to get that 100% level but the list was starting from a blank sheet of paper. It is idealistic but they are listed to show the type of activities that would achieve the end goal rather than a series of steps to follow.
Maybe the remuneration of management should be the next topic?
Thanks, Greavsie
June 23, 2008 at 9:28 am |
Hi
Where you have the link to Idea Management Systems, you send it to one Idea Management software vendor (JPB/Jenni). Jenni is a good product and highly worthy of praise, but if you are providing general advice for your readers you might like to use a more general link to a range of Idea Management Systems such as my Idea Management Systems blog at http://www.ideamanagementsystems.com/, the Innovation Tools page on Idea Management Systems, or a Wikipedia article on Idea Management Systems.
Hope this is useful!
June 24, 2008 at 4:21 pm |
Your list is comprehensive enough that I mentioned it in my blog post today for the Innovators-Network. Thanks for picquing my interest and I hope to send some of my readers you way so they can check out your entire list for themselves. Keep up the good work!