The (Non)Sense of Employee-Focused Innovation Training

A lot has been written about Innovation Training in the recent past. At Culturevate, we clearly see the sense of such training, but there are some important conditions that needs to be met for these efforts to generate long-term impact for an organization. Not all companies understand these conditions, which often leads to mediocre results and missed opportunities. One extra difficulty is that a good Innovation Training should be driven by and aligned with several functional parts of a large corporate organization.

An innovation training effort should be an integral part of any corporate innovation program/strategy. A concrete training effort gives a clear message that innovation should be taken seriously and supports your employees who may not know how or where to begin.

However, just launching an innovation training effort independently, without context to a company’s strategy or culture, will create confusion and generate low output at best. We prefer a model that makes use of the momentum of a training effort to explain (and reinforce) the organization’s innovation program and strategy throughout the curriculum. This way, you achieve the additional advantage that a big picture strategy is much better understood by the community and that the training fits in the big picture strategy of the company.

Read the full blog about The (Non)Sense of Employee-Focused Innovation Training visit Innovation Management. Also get updated with our Latest Articles related to Organizations and Culture, Strategy, Life Cycle Process etc.

An Innovation Portal…I Can Do That Myself

Innovation portals have taken an important place in the open innovation landscape. Expectations are great in portal performance but often, for purely budgetary reasons, these portals are launched and managed internally by corporates themselves, to discover that they generate a number of community management issues that they are not used to coping with. Prior to launching a corporate portal it is a good idea to ask a few specific questions on whether to do this internally or through experienced third party innovation providers.

Open innovation is entering into a new phase. The way corporates are viewing open innovation has shifted radically and today there is a tendency for companies to ask themselves “why should I hire a third party service provider to do open innovation when I can do this myself?”

“Anyone can build furniture as long as they buy it from Ikea but that does not make them a cabinet-maker.”

The apparent simplicity of setting up an innovation portal is perhaps at the heart of the do-it-yourself portal mythology as it is so easy to download WordPress, code a few pages and then “build it and they will come”

Here is not the end…. To view the full blog about An Innovation Portal…I Can Do That Myself visit Innovation Management.

You can also explore its new Online Learning Innovation Programs and get updated with its Latest Articles.

The Value of Incremental Innovation

In this Blog I want to talk about the value of incremental innovation and why companies should often focus on this, rather than driving as hard as they can to come up with the next breakthrough product or service. Incremental improvements aren’t always cool, but over time they can drive significant business results.

Before proceeding, I should once again outline the kind of companies that I often work with. They are not the Apple’s, Google’s or Amazon’s of the world. I tend to work with organizations that are well established, not at a point of imminent collapse, and often trying to be innovative, but struggling to execute on their ideas. No company that I have ever worked with has a shortage of ideas.

A focus on incremental innovations, and the activities that source and develop them, make sense in the following context:

Pipeline Management: Too often I see organizations filling an innovation pipeline with large-scale, broadly scoped, long-term innovations that leave their programs vulnerable. I say the world “vulnerable” with purpose. Innovation programs are often politically sensitive and need to be extremely conscious of the constant pressure to undermine their achievements and goals (read this article for more details). By having a pipeline that is balanced, there is a better chance that at least some activities will be implemented, balancing out some of the failures which you are sure to encounter.

Starting a program: Often leaders of new innovation management programs are tempted to focus on big thinking. And why not? It is sexy, cool and fun! The reality is that new programs will face some healthy skepticism by their leadership, especially within established business units, so it is important to get some runs on the board. By quickly demonstrating success, even with smaller ideas, you are able to create an impression of momentum and a build towards bigger ticket thinking.

Pressure on results: Innovation leaders are often told by leadership that they want “Big I” ideas, but at the same time (or soon after) there is pressure to generate immediate financial impact. In this case you just don’t have the time to develop the big ideas, so it can be a better position to generate some incremental improvements. This can take the immediate pressure off and allow you to demonstrate a rate of success in order to build some political capital to focus on bigger ideas.

Generating Stakeholder buy-in: If you are struggling to secure and maintain stakeholder buy-in, focusing on incremental improvements can demonstrate your ability to drive change, without destroying their organization (often their concern) or needlessly redirecting resources. By building success, aligned with their needs (an important point to understand), you can secure their buy-in and support over time.

Launching innovation challenges: There is no shortage of innovation platform vendors in the marketplace, and many of them will encourage you to run challenges or campaigns that focus on big, bold visions of the future. This is especially true when they are launching their product into your organization, as they want substantial engagement metrics to justify investment in their platform. In my experience, and this may be controversial, launching with these “Big I” crowdsourced challenges early will encourage a lot of employee excitement. However if you don’t have an established model of idea execution, that excitement will dissipate (at best) or turn negative when the participants realize that their ideas haven’t been built. By focusing on smaller areas of improvement, especially when launching these efforts, you can build community trust and demonstrate real traction with the winning ideas.

Cultural pushback: Many mature and regulated organizations often have cultures that pushback on new thinking, in any form. Within this environment, it is important to assess how much you can enhance the culture, in terms of new ideas development. Focusing on smaller improvements can be a way to limit potential pushback, and give you a chance to demonstrate that something can be built effectively within that culture. By the way, a goal should absolutely be to change that culture over time.

In conclusion, I am not saying that innovation program leaders should focus on incremental innovation at all times. What I am saying, is that just because an idea is small, or a program is in place to generate responses to more modest issues, it shouldn’t be discarded. By considering the broader context of the organization’s culture, and also the ecosystem of innovative activity within an organization, incremental improvements should make some level of sense. These smaller ideas aren’t going to get you on the cover of Time magazine, but they may help your retain you job and drive real, cumulative business impact over time.