Six Ideas To Drive Culture Change In Innovation

Ask any innovation consultant or innovation employee within a company and they’ll both agree that long-lasting success in new models for innovation boils down to one key issue: changing the corporate culture to embrace these new approaches.  Without culture change you will not achieve long-term success. You may have an occasional win here and there, or an occasional breakthrough may occur but this is not the same as a sustainable, permanent change in your “business model” for innovation.

With than in mind, we did an informal survey of recommendations from several sources, added some of our own ideas, and compiled our list of top six recommendations:

1) Build Collaboration into Your Employee Evaluation System (source: Business Week and 3M)

http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content/sep2009/id2009092_680626.htm

From the BW article: “Reward employees not just for developing an innovative technology, idea, or process, but for spreading it. No company reaps the benefits of collaboration if their employees or managers are hoarding innovation in order to look good at the next quarterly meeting.”

2) Create Innovation Funds (source: Business Week and 3M)

http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content/sep2009/id2009092_680626.htm

As stated in the article, “Managers focused on core-related projects often don't want to spend money exploring or developing innovative ideas. To overcome this common roadblock, companies should create an alternative source—3M calls these Genesis Grants—that employees can go to for funding of innovation projects that don't fit neatly into existing departments.”

3) Innovation Events need to be part of an Overall Strategy

While contests and prize-based challenges can be important elements of an innovation strategy, these should not be your only focus. Look for ways to develop ongoing innovation activities such as allowing employees to dedicate a certain % of their time to unstructured thought and creative thinking. All innovation activities must be conducted in the context of an ongoing innovation strategy.

4) Encourage Risk Taking

While this is nothing new, what is needed are fresh approaches to encourage risk taking. One idea is to have employees share failures internally in order to learn from (and accept) unsuccessful projects. This can go a long way to developing a culture that encourages (and does not punish) risk-taking. Intel calls their approach Failing Forward.

 5) Look Inside the Company First

Too often companies rush to drive external innovation without first considering whether they have fully exhausted all internal sources. Turning your innovation strategy inward (as a starting point) will not only ensure you have uncovered all possible internal sources of innovation but it helps companies practice the necessary skills that will serve them well when they go external - skills such as framing the right question, learning to collaborate, and driving transparency in the organization.

6) Top Management Must Show Support

Senior leadership must not only talk the talk, but they need to walk it too. And how can they walk it? By developing and communicating a clear strategy on what steps they are going to take to support new approaches to innovation. They could start with steps 1-5 outlined here.

Crowdsourcing and the BP Oil Spill

BP Should Have Properly Framed Their Needs
Re-posted from Cesar Castro's Open Innovation Blog - 
Cesar is Co-Founder and CEO of DiscoveryCast

BP has received a lot of criticism for failing to respond adequately (or in a timely manner) to the thousands of ideas that it received, both solicited and unsolicited. If they (BP) would have followed a few key elements of open innovation and crowdsourcing, perhaps this would have had a better result. As of this post, I am aware that BP is currently reviewing the submissions and hopefully they’ll glean something of value to prevent future disasters of this scale.

Where did they go wrong?

1) Asking the Question: Trying to present a single solution that addressed all of the challenges facing BP is like trying to cure cancer with one experiment. What BP should have done is break the challenge down into various key categories (containment, recovery, clean up, etc) and posed a series of requests in each category. That would have directed the crowd to focus on one area or another.

2) Collaboration: To my knowledge, both the solicited and unsolicited ideas were brought forward by individuals and/or companies, with no ability to see each others ideas and build or improve them. A more collaborative process would have gone a long way to improve the quality of ideas and perhaps even reduce the total number of ideas (since people would find other ideas to build on before entering their own).

3) Filters: clearly with this number of ideas you need filters. Again, with a truly crowdsourced and collaborative process the crowd can act as a filter. Not sure how BP is filtering / analyzing the ideas submitted but I’m pretty sure that at this point the crowd isn’t involved.

Perhaps one thing they did achieve (not by design, I might add) was diversity. It looked like they were getting ideas from all over the world and from a diverse group of participants. What a wasted opportunity.

Lastly, perhaps there is a chance for BP to open up these submissions to the global community and see if they can salvage some ideas to prevent this from happening again in the future. I’m sure there are a few diamonds in that pile of information.

Principles of Open Innovation

DiscoveryCast's ideation services can been seen as an example of open innovation. Why? Because many of the principles that drive our methodology and platform are consistent with the principles of open innovation. With that in mind, let's take a look at key principles that companies must embrace to be successful in ideation and open innovation.

1.     Develop More Transparency  - starting with your own company, look for ways to share information and build trust with all of your employees and be sure to demand the same from them.  Make your organization as flat (and non-hierarchical) as possible. With your outside world of customers and partners, look for opportunities to open up or share information beyond the basic transactional exchange of information.  Intuit holds an annual Entrepreneur Day where they invite customers to spend a day with Intuit senior management in an open idea exchange.

2.     Engage with networks – we live in a highly networked society and the employees (and customers) of tomorrow will have spent their entire lives in this networked world.  Be aware of the value of these networks and encourage your employees to actively participate in professional networks, blogs, and other social media.  There is a wealth of useful (and often) free information that is available.

3.     Embrace community – by definition, most successful networks have a sense of community or shared purpose.  This implies a certain set of norms and expected behavior for members of a specific community.  Interestingly enough, these communities can offer a great deal of insight and value to its members.  On LinkedIn alone there are over 3000 innovation-related groups.

4.     Competitors can be collaborators – this may seem a little unusual to some, but this new world of innovation should force you to rethink what defines a competitor and ways in which you can work together.  If you sell office productivity software, for example, are you competing against other software providers or is your bigger obstacle customer indifference towards your product?  P&G, for example, licensed a core plastic film technology to Clorox, a staunch competitor in certain markets, because P&G was no longer in the plastic film business.  This would have been unimaginable fifteen years ago.  Small companies can cooperate at certain levels to create entire eco-systems around new technology that can help raise the market opportunity for all involved.  Twitter is a good example of a recent innovation in social media that has spawned an entire ecosystem of new services, all benefiting one another.

5.     Discourage the “Not Invented Here” syndrome – nothing kills an idea faster than the belief that your company has all the answers and no possible expertise exists outside your company’s four walls. Time and again we have seen success stories that completely debunk this theory.  No single entity, regardless of size or scope, can legitimately claim to know all the experts in a given area. “Proudly found elsewhere” is a commonly used term to describe the new mindset you need to adopt.

 6.  Engage with failure – failure is a reality and a necessary part of the innovation process. Failure today takes on a different context when you consider that one person’s failure is another’s success.  Use failure as an opportunity to re-frame the question or seek completely new sources of solutions.  Failure sometimes is the result of asking the wrong question or focusing your efforts in the wrong area.

How 3M Fosters a Culture of Collaboration

Great article in Business Week on how 3M encourages (and, more importantly, rewards & recognizes) collaboration.

From the article:

"What can executives learn from 3M's approach to collaboration?

Support networks. Build Web-based social networks that help employees with a problem find those with an answer. Support grassroots networking initiatives such as 3M's TechForum—an employee-run group that organizes speaker events to stimulate thinking and also serves as a kind of mixer, where scientists from different labs or divisions can connect in person.
Build collaboration into your employee evaluation system. Reward employees not just for developing an innovative technology, idea, or process, but for spreading it. No company reaps the benefits of collaboration if their employees or managers are hoarding innovation in order to look good at the next quarterly meeting.
Encourage curiosity. 3M allows employees to spend 15% of their time on projects of their choosing, giving them permission to develop ideas or technologies that may be outside of their regular work focus. Such policies increase the odds of collaboration, as the path of curiosity often leads employees beyond their knowledge base, to a place where they need the advice and insight of others.
Create innovation funds. Group or department managers focused on core-related projects often don't want to spend money exploring or developing innovative ideas. To overcome this common roadblock, companies should create an alternative source—3M calls these Genesis Grants—that employees can go to for funding of innovation projects that don't fit neatly into existing departments."

Great Real World Example of Ideation In Action

From the British Quality Foundation blog comes a great example of the power of soliciting ideas from your employees. They tout a simple, yet effective, system to collect ideas from all employees via a company-sponsored website.

Some of the factors that we at DiscoveryCast believe are contributing to their success include:

* effective reward/recognition program
* the use of a leaderboard to show which departments are contributing the most ideas and thereby having the largest impact on innovation

We also believe in the power of motivation and recognition and have these features "baked in" on our ideation platform and methodology. It's great to see ideation in action!!

Prize Competitions vs. Ideation Events

Great post on the Hypios blog where they reference a Ted Talk by Dan Pink. The talk focuses on motivating creativity (what incentives work and don't work).



Several very interesting conclusions:

* financial incentives are merely one source of motivation and, furthermore, can actually de-motivate the participants in certain circumstances
* not all innovation-driven efforts need to be zero-sum; prize competitions such as the X-Prize or Netflix prize appear on the surface to be zero-sum - there are clear winners and losers; however if you talk to any of the finalists for the Netflix Prize you'll learn that they derived significant benefit from simply participating
* the presence of a leaderboard in the Netflix competition was actually not demotivating - it gave all the participants a clear idea of where they stood in the competition and helped motivate them to do better

It is precisely these motivating factors that will drive the success of the DiscoveryCast Ideation Events. And we've added a few new wrinkles of our own.

We have developed several key features that focus on the participants intrinsic motivations: working on an interesting challenge, establishing your reputation by the quality of ideas you share, and reward (points system) & recognition (participants can level-up to higher rankings based on their ideas). We even hide the participants identities in order to create a level playing field. We also let participants build/comment/question other ideas.  And finally, we provide no financial incentives in our business model.

DiscoveryCast Website launching Nov 3, 2009

November 3, 2009 is the day that www.discoverycast.com will be live for the world to see. Let us know what you think!