Innovation is not only about generating new ideas, but implementing them across your organization. However, this can be challenging due to various barriers such as silos, culture, processes, and resources. Here are some tips to overcome these obstacles and integrate innovation throughout your organization?
Your vision and strategy for innovation should align with your organizational goals and values. This will help you communicate the purpose and benefits of innovation to all stakeholders, and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Use tools such as vision statements, roadmaps, and scorecards to track and measure your innovation progress and impact.
Integrating innovation across an organization requires cultivating a mindset where every team member feels empowered to contribute ideas, and establishing processes that seamlessly connect these ideas to strategic goals and operational realities.
Start with the why - why is innovation important for your department ? Start with the big picture and bring it close to the people. What's in it for the company, what's in it for them, what's the reward, what if there is no innovation. Integrate gamification and call out relatable success stories. Good luck!
To successfully integrate innovation across an organisation, it is crucial to establish a culture that fosters creativity, implement processes that support innovation, and provide resources for experimentation and development. Doing so creates a culture where creativity flourishes, and new ideas are consistently generated and implemented to drive growth and success.
Uber, Covaxin, Intel 486, iPhone 12 or Boeing 757 - which is good innovation. ?? In fact all of them, it takes an organisation to think in multiple ways to innovate, for example 1) Smart Incremental Innovation - like Intel 386, 486, pentium, Apple iphone 8,9,10,11, may be Boeing 757, 767, etc. Don't shy away doing the routine innovation, these are great products. 2) Business model innovation - same car, but Ride sharing services that changed the landscape of taxi (Uber), smart thinking. 3) Radical Tech innovation - Digital Imaging, EVs - defines new markets altogether. 4) Disruptive Innovation - like new Vaccine, exploring life on MARS, etc. Distant future thinkers. All these innovation are much needed for all.
For CEOs who urgently need to build an Innovation Engine for their organization, a general corporate strategy does not suffice. At Google, we've seen that a highly-effective Innovation Strategy addresses 10 key themes: 1. Secure Leadership buy-in (urgency & alignment) 2. Assessment of the status-quo (situation analysis) 3: Craft an Innovation Perspective (select hunting grounds) 4: Develop Innovation Portfolio (track your bets) 5: Choose Innovation Model (innovation initiatives) 6: Establish Innovation Framework (build-measure-learn loop) 7: Involve key Stakeholders (e.g. legal) 8: Establish Innovation KPIs (measuring success) 9: Enablement Of Teams (innovation trainings) 10: Introduce tools & Systems (software to manage bets)
These should collaborate and co-create across different departments and functions. This will leverage the diverse skills, perspectives, and experiences of your employees, and foster a culture of innovation and learning. Tools such as design thinking, agile methods, and hackathons can facilitate cross-functional teamwork and problem-solving.
Cross-contamination is necessary to overcome that "we have always done this way" bias. To build cross-functional, and possibly cross-company / cross-value-chain teams to co-innovate is essential
Because design processes and tools are evolving, businesses are more and more implementing Design-led innovation approaches on the top of design thinking.
Cross functional teams are only helpful if they are led by a cross functional c-suite leader. This leader needs to be able and willing to intervene when one of the business silos tries to pull a team member back inside. They also need to have a clear, financially defensible reason for establishing the team.
Multifunctional teams, with diverse skills, drive innovation by fostering collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity. Effective innovation management involves cultivating a culture of open communication, continuous learning, and embracing a risk-tolerant mindset. The relationship between multifunctional teams and innovation management is vital for staying competitive. Organization. Multidisciplinary interaction can lead to "creative abrasion," enhancing effectiveness. Without T-shaped skills, teams risk destructive abrasion (Karjalainen et al, 2009).
My 3 tips: - make sure it is a priority for the cross functional teams (i.e included in their goals). - Ensure 100% alignment against the innovation strategy (don't allow pet projects where a solution is developed that is looking for a problem). - Ensure the whole company brain is engaged (i.e diversity of inputs from lots of different backgrounds including externally like suppliers).
This will enable and support innovation across your organization. Bureaucracy, complexity, and waste will be reduced while efficiency, flexibility, and speed will increase. Use lean startup, innovation portfolio, and stage-gate to manage your innovation projects and experiments.
The secret to innovation lies in empowering everyone to experiment broadly and at scale while ensuring the process remains cost-effective. When innovation is made frictionless, cheap, and fast, people are encouraged to test new ideas, refine concepts, and pivot swiftly without the fear of costly failures. This approach creates a culture where creativity flourishes, and promising ideas can be rapidly transformed into impactful solutions, giving organizations a significant competitive advantage. Simplifying access to resources and reducing barriers to experimentation fuels a continuous cycle of innovation that benefits everyone involved.
If you were given a choice of doing innovation work on one of these four projects, which would you pick? A) Using AI to speed up drug discovery B) Generating power from Volcanoes C) Creating a 3d printed house that could withstand a hurricane D) Creating a better corporate process Would *anyone* pick choice D? We are all conditioned to believe that big exciting projects are where innovation should be directed, and that it would be exciting to work on. But having worked in innovation for more than a decade on a wide range of projects, I have found that there can be incredible beauty/value in transforming the most 'boring' of processes. Deep down, *every* project is composed of countless tiny pieces. Often mundane pieces. Embrace them!
In my experience it is important to have the right governance in place to make sure innovation does not fall through the cracks within an organization. Some ways to ensure this could be setting up a diverse innovation group of enthusiasts, key decision makers and Architects who, along with some open innovation plan, can also help with a central orchestration. This will ensure innovative ideas are implemented in order to solve a business challenge or improve the output of the organization. A streamlined process will also help aligning Innovation with your long term business strategy.
Innovation management within companies, particularly larger corporations, faces a key challenge: the development of effective strategies or processes for overseeing and sustaining innovation projects. Within these larger entities, a multitude of functions—ranging from engineering, product, marketing to customer service teams —operate with distinct insights into customer needs, market dynamics, and technological advancements. Achieving innovative business value necessitates alignment across these diverse teams. Establishing a well-organized innovation process becomes crucial for seamlessly transferring ideas among these teams, thus translating concepts into tangible products and driving meaningful business value.
A hackathon, if well prepared, is a great way to engage within your ecosystem, define some common challenges and drive the change. People inside and outside of your company will have a great time working together at solving problems and with a good initial strategic fit of your challenges, you can funnel the outcomes and deliver quickly some added value solutions that support not only your business but also others needs by design
Equip your employees for innovation by investing in your resources. This will develop a talent pool of innovators, and provide them with the necessary tools, training, and incentives to innovate. Innovation labs, platforms, networks, and other tools foster innovation communities and collaborations.
How about and…. Compensate your resources? Innovators who add significant business velocity or efficiency should be rewarded with more responsibility and more pay. Not all innovators are potential leaders. So the old organizational structure needs to be reconsidered. What is the expertise track for individuals and teams who have successfully fostered these skills?
Integrating innovation thought process investment in resources eventually helps to build confidence within team members. Adapting innovation within resources helps them to increase their productivity on daily activities. Encouraging resources on innovation with perks helps team to motivate and expand resources out of the box thought process. It eventually helps to produce skill development and quality deliverables from resource perspective.
In my experience, investing in your people and resources is critical to building a culture of innovation. Providing employees with the right tools, training, and incentives empowers them to think creatively and take ownership of innovation projects. One thing I’ve found helpful is creating innovation labs and fostering collaborations through platforms and networks. These investments not only develop a strong talent pool but also build a sustainable innovation ecosystem within the organization.
Implement a fair and transparent system for recognizing and rewarding innovation contributions, aligning individual and organizational goals.
Investing in resources is often seen as investing reward structures. It is more important to invest in training to ensure that people have the knowledge and skills to innovate across all levels of the organisation.
Improve and iterate your innovation efforts by reviewing your feedback. This will capture and analyze the data and insights from your innovation activities, and use them to inform your decisions and actions. Customer feedback, metrics, and reviews can be used to evaluate and validate your innovation outcomes and value.
You need different sources of feedback at different levels of maturity: Stage 1: customer interviews Stage 2: user tests with a prototype Stage 3: beta test with a first release of the product Stage 4: full release with a fully built product
Adding to Greg's outline of incrementally evolving design-test-feedback loops by stage. Throughout the Stage-Gate process, you obtain feedback from a variety of players: - Customers participating in solution concepts, prototypes and field trials - The broader market to validate the need, value proposition, and effectiveness of marketing communications - Internal organization readiness to support the innovation - External partner readiness to support the innovation - Internal leadership to confirm the continued value and fit with the strategic portfolio.
By encouraging innovative ideas and people that bring them forward. Verify the conviction and the logic behind. Then allocate the budget for the idea to be executed along with the right team. Perhaps across multiple functions. Once executed, celebrate the process and the people. Publicly recognize them so that more people will feel like thinking out of the box. This beautiful loop will continue on its own! That's the hope at least!
Implement regular governance reviews to ensure that innovation initiatives remain aligned with the organization's strategic objectives and risk appetite.
Fa?a "seu PDCA". colete os feedbacks e trabalhe para que seja melhor em projetos futuros. Aprenda com o passado, mas jogue o game do agora.
Recognize and reward your employees for their innovation contributions. You'll create a positive and supportive environment for innovation, and motivate and inspire your employees to continue innovating. Recognition programs, awards, events are facets to celebrate and share your innovation stories and best practices.
Para integrar a inova??o em toda a organiza??o, é vital celebrar os sucessos, independentemente de seu tamanho. Comemorar conquistas cria um ambiente positivo que reconhece o esfor?o e a criatividade das equipes, incentivando um espírito de colabora??o e motiva??o. Essas celebra??es n?o apenas refor?am a importancia da inova??o, mas também ajudam a disseminar histórias de sucesso que podem inspirar outros colaboradores a se envolverem em iniciativas inovadoras. Ao reconhecer e valorizar os resultados, você fortalece a cultura de inova??o na organiza??o, fazendo com que todos se sintam parte do processo e motivados a buscar novas oportunidades.
It's really important to discuss what constitutes meaningful recognition directly with the players involved in the full spectrum of innovation. When leaders make assumptions here it can really backfire. For example, some of our studies indicate that employees who participate in low to moderate-risk innovations often prefer visual recognition delivered by top leaders instead of compensation schemes. However, on the other end of the spectrum (new technology breakthroughs), companies like 3M have had good success with partial equity offers. It's not the specific format that matters. It's the match of the format to the desires of the intended recipients that matters.
Celebrar y reconocer las contribuciones de los equipos que apuestan por la innovación, no solo contribuye a la apropiación del mindset como tal, si no también fomenta que las personas a lo largo y ancho de las compa?ías esten motivadas y empedradas para innovar. Tener y contar con un programa de reconocimiento hace de la innovación un proceso sistemático y una capacidad organizacional constante.
At the Microsoft Garage Vancouver, we integrate innovation by emphasizing that success is as much about connections, learning, and personal growth as it is about outcomes. We celebrate innovation by recognizing employees who build strong networks, continually learn, and evolve into better collaborators and thinkers. This approach not only inspires and motivates but also enhances our ability to create exceptional products. Through recognition programs, awards, and events, we share innovation stories and best practices, highlighting the journey of growth and connection that drives meaningful innovation.
Ok, celebrate their successes. Party hats and noisemakers. First of all if someone is helping create a significant step change in market value, they should probably own a piece of the company. Secondly, this will become more important as AI and robotics takes on codifiable and automatable business tasks. (Although not writing articles on innovation seemingly). The very nature of work needs to shift, but evolution is a tricky thing to predict. What does our gall bladder do again?
Innovation isn’t just about ideas – ideas are cheap. It’s about bringing ideas to impact. The best innovation initiatives aren’t just surfacing ideas from different teams or divisions, although that is an important activity. It is about defining (and resourcing) a system that turns those ideas into early tests, iterates upon successful tests, and nurtures those ideas into real products or internal solutions. Bringing innovation to all corners of a company requires more than just a big speech about it. It requires the hard and courageous work of really talented people to bring their ideas to impact.
Avoid introducing new ways of innovating too often. Change fatigue sets in, and it becomes difficult to convince employees and management to constantly try new ways of working. One organization I worked with rolled out new methodologies annually (design thinking, agile, lean), even while the previous ones were partially implemented. As a leader, refining and evolving existing processes - staying focused on understanding the customer, addressing their needs, and data driven decisions - yields more sustainable results than chasing the next new thing.
Innovation will not be fully integrated across the organization until one common language is embraced and understood across all functions and across all levels. Stage-Gate is the only purpose-built function-neutral process to do exactly this. Too many organizations waste time internally debating which method is the best method for them to adopt: Stage-Gate, design thinking, agile, scrum, lean development, jobs to be done, etc. This is the wrong question as each performs and builds a unique capability that enables innovation success. The dark side of this destructive debate is that subject matter experts are being asked to ditch their best-of-breed capability-building methods to conform to a method that makes no sense to them.
Una herramienta que suelo usar son los "Six Thinking Hats" de Edward de Bono que ofrecen un marco para el pensamiento paralelo, asignando un color a cada enfoque mental. Esta metodología fomenta el uso de diferentes perspectivas, representadas por los colores de los sombreros (blanco para datos objetivos, rojo para emociones, negro para juicio crítico, amarillo para optimismo, verde para creatividad y azul para control del proceso). Al aplicarlo a decisiones estratégicas y de dise?o, este enfoque permite abordar de manera sistemática y holística los problemas, facilitando la consideración de múltiples ángulos y reduciendo los sesgos individuales, lo que lleva a decisiones más informadas y equilibradas.
In my experience, a 100% integration of innovation delivery into business is not really possible. You can introduce an innovation culture across the organization so everyone can contribute and have the appropriate mindset, but it is a good idea to have a multidisciplinary team fully dedicated to innovation projects and developments. The key point is that this team must not work isolated and there should be an incentive for everyone to participate in this team, so it creates an aspirational goal.