The best way to predict the future is to create it.

"Our company is too small to formalize an innovation process - so, if you have an innovation idea, submit it to your manager, and he will fix the rest".

Sound familiar to you? Are you really happy providing this answer to your employees when they hunger for a solid innovation practice? Do you believe that young professionals think a non-defined process is smart? Try attend the next university visit, and tell the students: "In my head, I believe that no-process for innovation is smart". Good luck, and be prepared when they throw bananas and eggs at you, most likely done verbally or by body language, if you are lucky.?

With only very few managers, and middle level managers, you risk that great ideas get lost when employees are told to submit their ideas to their manager. Do you believe that all employees dare to tell managers about their ideas? Many fear the shame of having provided a "bad idea" on the table. Furthermore you risk having multiple innovation ideas lists, duplicates etc, or no list at all. Are you confident that all managers will dedicate time to listen to great ideas, build upon them, communicate them internally? Do you think they have the energy required, or the competence to bring ideas forward in an effective way? Do they individually see the whole picture? Are they interested in innovation at all?

Most likely many of them are too occupied with operations, and some employees even fear that of being allocated for innovation work - it's risky, in downturns all know these jobs often are looked at first when deciding what's needed to "keep the lights on", they experience job cuts.

Have you ever reflected over the fact that a secret killer of innovation is shame? It's a deep fear we all have, in that of being wrong, the fear of having co-workers look down on you, being belittled. The fear is so strong that employees keep their ideas for themselves, they don't share the ideas with their managers. The risk of shame stops your company in that of taking risks to bring your company further. The advice is to start of by creating an environment that is safe, show openness and vulnerability, create ideation processes where a neutral process handles incoming ideas - lower the felt risk for your employees.

Ask yourself, can we afford to have an in-effective innovation process, can we afford that our employees see their ideas disappear? If you don't handle the innovation ideas well, you will for sure never get ideas from your employees one more time. When you witness that your initiatives are thrown away, forgotten, you are trained to never submit a new idea. Young professionals are attracted to companies that manage innovation in a professional way. Does your company need the best resources? You know the answer. Your competitors will tell the applicants about their innovation lab, their innovation process and their innovation focus.

"In our company ideas are brought forward if the idea comes from a top level manager" - have you heard this before? Probably not, but don't be shocked, it might very well be the situation in your company. Try to reflect if this is a kind of sentence your employees don't dare to tell you. Yes, they don't dare, some of them are afraid of the consequences, and for protecting themselves from penalty, they keep quiet. Are you actively hunting for ideas from customers, partners and employees? If not, your employees have observed this a long time ago, you are "modeling" an anti-creativity and anti-innovation culture - killing all initiatives from the ground. You should do the opposite - model a creativity and innovation culture.

If you have a core value of that of being "innovative", "being brave", "taking initiative"- you have to build and grow an innovation culture, and remove any obstacles. This culture must have a solid top management and owner support. If your responsibility is heavily connected to secure and stable operations, you should deeply consider establishing an innovation team that aren't bound to secure and stable operations. Daily operations eat innovation ideas for lunch every day, this is a classic problem in the world of innovation. "But, we have never had specific roles responsible for innovation. Innovation is handled by our CIO." In a situation where the CIO has to choose between innovation and "secure and stable operation" (keep the lights on), the latter will be selected, most of the time, if not all the time.

Have you ever in history felt there is a huge gap, e.g. between the technology platform you have, and the best in breed? Why didn't your company catch up? There is a high risk this will happen again if you continue to let "operations" manage innovation, and if you continue not taking innovation seriously.

Great ideas are built upon other ideas. When people don't see the co-workers (or customers, partners) ideas, you also destroy idea collaboration. Let's imagine that only 1 out of 100 ideas have a great potential, should you give up? No, you should do the opposite, accelerate and enhance ideation processes, and maximize collaboration.

So, why do managers leave out that of focusing on an innovation process? There are probably many different answers. It might be the reason is one feel one have enough innovation ideas. The challenge is rather within implementation, which very well might be a fact. It might be that the top level management haven't allocated budget for dedicated innovation teams and processes, that there is a lack of understanding with respect to the need of innovation. Independent of what reasons are behind, the company generates a big ideation loss. Ideas that set the ground for your competitive advantages in the future.

Very often one talk about "incremental innovation", the smaller new steps your company can take. It can be a new product within an existing line, a new feature in a software product and so on. We also talk about ground breaking innovation, as something the world has never seen, at least almost not. We have innovation in processes, channels, technology and the more.

In an agile team you typically work with your areas of responsibility, you create and operate applications, for employees, customers and partners. Furthermore, it might be that a completed design sprint leave you a minimum viable product (MVP) of something new, and your team continue the work of that of moving from a MVP to a more complete product.

If you don't plan for innovation, your agile teams will get a harder job in that of bringing remarkable new innovations to your customeres, they often end up being too "operations driven".

And, you need to be remarkable, if not, your customers will not stop at your shop, it's that simple. If you drive your car and see 100 brown cows, you will not stop to take a photo, unless one of them are purple - that is remarkable.

In order to be remarkable you need to bring smart and frictionless solutions that adds value to your customers. E.g. (just an idea) an optional and integrated payment solution that fits the customers private liquidity budget and way of paying, including highly relevant upsell products from partners that are easy to add to the cart, at buying situations where you normally don't expect that. This sounds simple, and not new, but it involves areas such as payment integration, cross-company planning, GDPR-issues and the more. It's simply too big for adding on top of daily operations, and fits perfectly well for a design sprint.

This might very well be a bad idea ("shame on me"), but the clue is that you lack ideas for that of being remarkable, and you lack an innovation process, and a team that can bring these ideas forward.

Furthermore, you probably, like many others, have another problem; you let innovation meet integration (and/or compliance) too early. One second after a new idea has been submitted it's killed, arguments being that it's too difficult, takes too much time to integrate with existing solutions and so on. If you expect to get lots of transactions, or risk killing data integrity, or any other reasons, you should of course be careful. But, for those of you that probably won't get overflowed by customers at the very beginning, some manual processing backstage is manageable. Let the customer experience a smooth travel, and enhance your backstage features later on. Work on the "perfect integration", in parallell with solution adaption.

So, where are you? No process for ideation and innovation, resignated employees with respect to innovation-ideas, fear for shame, no dedicated innovation roles, ideas killed due to integration or compliance issues, zero collaboration on ideas. Ask yourself; where do the ideas come from?Always from the top floor, department x etc? Have you modeled a safe innovation culture? Remember that employees are afraid of being shamed due to weak ideas. Shame becomes fear - fear leads to risk aversion - risk aversion kills innovation.

It might be you should assess the area of innovation - dare to ask your employees about their satisfaction with respect to innovation and related processes - remember that in asking and getting their feedback - they will expect that change will happen - which can be a rather big transformation for some companies, and smaller adjustments for others.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.“ - Alan Kay (born 1940), Computer scientist.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.