There are lots of blogs, articles, academic papers, seminars and conventions dedicated to explaining how enterprises should innovate.
There are even experts, consultancy firms and people like me that have innovation in their job specification.
In fact, a whole industry has been built on the topic. Yet still it eludes most managers and their firms. So just to add to the noise, here are my top three, yes, just three tips on how to innovate in your department.
Innovate when everyone is at his or her cleverest.
We all know, without any shadow of a doubt that ‘we are all clever after the fact.’ So can there possible be any better time to innovate. When something isn’t working or has gone wrong, put your thinking caps on. I know this may sound obvious, but there is a subtle difference in thinking innovatively in this situation and just working out what the heck are we going to do to sort this mess out:
The milk has been spilt, so there is no point crying about it and it can’t get any worse. So let’s get creative, let’s ask whether we should be using milk in the first place.
Ask the people that know best what we should do.
I recently found an amazing piece of insight about a product my firm supplies through analysing unstructured social media data. I validated what I found with the last two years complaints records and found a correlation to inform a business case to change the product feature that caused all of the negative sentiment. Proud of myself I was telling a couple of colleagues in the contact centre about it, and instead of telling me how clever I was, they said ‘oh yeah, we knew that.’
We spend lots of management time and resources trying to figure out how what our customers are thinking, when those people that interact with them every day know. They understand how they feel about us and what their perceptions of us are – but do we ever ask them? Do we spend as much time asking our front line colleagues what they think our customers would think is pretty amazing instead of trying to figure out 40,000 feet from the front line?
It doesn’t matter how many ideas you have.
Successful innovation is not in having the ideas, the insight or data to support the ideas, the business case or the ROI models – it’s in the delivery.
Give the innovation task to the people that deliver. The best innovations in the world are the ones that get delivered; the ones that weren’t delivered are probably all OTE, overtaken by events.
They don’t have to be huge innovations; incremental change is the way of things. It works for Apple and Dell, 3M and GE, some of the greatest innovators in the world. Great leaps like landing a man on the moon relied on hundreds of small incremental innovations, like a pen that works in space (a pencil of you’re a Russian astronaut).
So innovation is simple:
Do it when it’s all gone tits up, ask the people closest to the most important people in the business, customers, and ask someone you know can deliver to do it.
Having fronted the innovations panel at C&W for three years it became apparent that there were some key elements to promote innovative behaviour.
ReplyDeleteBusiness as usual;
It is essential that frontliners understand how to identify and undertand how to report back on elements that they come across that may need a fix. This must be facilitated.
Thereafter they need tangible proof and confidence that it has been accepted and most importantly that something is being done about it if required. This must be visible.
To conclude there must be some reward and recognition of their input - even if it is just highlighting the problem. This cannot not happen.
This is really creating a working mindset to look out for problems and reporting back rather than accepting that that is the way it is.
Innovation is laced with anticipation and a proactive approach and is lanced with questions like 'Is there another/better way of doing this?' - 'what else could we be doing'
Pure innovation is not so specific and comes from a blank space start where people are encouraged - recognised and rewarded for bringing new ideas to the table.
Those people exist throughout the company - throughout the customer base. The challenge is how to tap into that on an ongoing basis.
That way instead of screaming at the iceberg when you are meant to be lowering the lifeboats - you would have missed the iceberg in the first place.