The big opportunity in the microcosm of user driven innovation

TLDR: In the focused pursuit of innovative solutions to drive strategic advantage corporations have an opportunity to accelerate again through the empowerment of user innovation.

Organizations have always prioritized their investments in the applications and solutions that yield the greatest impact, measuring success through the outcomes it might have on the productivity of the employee population, or the positive advocacy it has through customer engagement. To be clear, and for the purpose of this article, the investments I refer to are not simply just that of a monetary value, but are also the investment of people to come up with new innovations, the skilled resources to implement and build new solutions and more.

When you look at this investment visually, you can visualize three different scales and their inverse relationships (as seen below).

We start first with Tier 1, and look at our examination of the "Number of Applications & Processes" in orange. At the top tier there are only a few solutions that get the lion's share of the company's investments (in green) in terms of resources (as mentioned before things like funds, skills, attention etc.), and it is these same applications that have the greatest and broadest impact on the organization's employee population (in blue).

As we move down in to Tier 2, we start to see the investments start to decrease, this is a result of the fact that the numbers of users impacted per application starts to go down. This is a result of the fact that as we go down further, these applications may be departmental level applications and solutions, and because there are many more departments than the single organization, this would result in the number of applications and processes starting to increase.

Finally as we move in to Tier 3, we see the minimal amount of investment (and in some cases zero investment) in to this space. Here the we are now getting in to the workgroup level organization, or sub departments. At this point application sprawl becomes inevitable as strategy is driven more by user choice versus organizational direction. At this level, the number of employees a solution impacts would be much smaller.

What is important to realize here is that while we might look at an organization as a singular operation (as seen in Figure A below), the reality is much more complicated. A single organization is made up of many sub organizational structures in the form of these departments, sub departments and work groups (as seen in Figure B below).

The representation of the organization in Figure B, is much more aligned to the proposed tiering of investments, applications and users impact introduced earlier, this can be seen in the graphic below.

Tier 1 refers to the entire organization, tier 2 to departmental and tier 3 to the sub-departments.

The reason I make this connection is that we need to recognize one important fact, that innovation can come from any level in the organization and from anyone, and if an organization recognizes and facilities this, it can be an incredible asset and major competitive advantage. Yet before I jump in to a solution and say, here is how you can do it. Would it surprise you that its already done before, and by my estimates... twenty years ago... at least by my count, and it happened without the intentional support of organizations.

Innovation generated from the departmental, sub departmental and workgroup level has already happened once before, and technology was key to it. In fact while this technology empowered many to innovate and create solutions that accelerated business, insights and more, it also served as one of the biggest inhibitors to Microsoft Office upgrades in its time. I refer to of course Excel Macros.

Excel took data capture, manipulation and analysis to the next level, its support of formulas enabled anyone with an idea and curiosity the opportunity to create incredible spreadsheets with complex calculations that directed the actions of people and businesses, becoming the platform for many low code application developers to add that little bit of extra functionality through Visual Basic for Applications code.

As the digitization of corporations continued, these Excel based applications became ingrained in to the daily business processes of these departments, and thus the organization. When it came time to upgrade the suite of Office applications, massive investments in terms of costs, specialized resources and time, had to be made to ensure that all these Excel spreadsheet based solutions were tested, remediated and migrated before mass migrations could take place. I know this because I was there...

Fast forward to 2022, we are at the crossroads again, where after 2 years of imposed lockdowns resulting from COVID hitting the world, employees are emerging more empowered to discover and innovate, ready to harness the ideas and opportunities they may not have realized they had before (I explored this idea in another article I wrote on Medium ). It is now that organizations have the opportunity to rethink about innovation coming from all areas of the business to deliver impact, and not the responsibility or capability of a single department or senior management.

This has certainly already started to happen with the huge number of case studies already on display, a good selection available here . My favorite being the example where a security personnel officer at Heathrow airport developed an application in the form of a language book to communicate with the variety of different languages spoken by passengers coming through the airport .

Low Code and No Code tools will ultimately be a key foundational technology that you can leverage to unleash this opportunity. Of course my biased view would be with Power Platform using Power Apps and Power Automate, but there are many incredible solutions out there from OutSystems, UiPath, Google and more. However the technology will only be the tools as part of the solution, the other side will be to ensure that employees are empowered with the best practices to handle data, and manage aspects of security, the pursuit of rapid innovation should not mean that corners should be cut.

Here there is the opportunity for the organization to invest in their own Centers of Excellence (COE) to support this motion, the COE can not only can help manage the process and practice, but also champion the culture across the organization.

At the beginning of this article I talked about the opportunity for microcosm of applications in the organization, and knowing that we have the tools and technologies, and the passion to innovate, we can look at two paths that can be taken independently or together.

1. Maybe its time to look at the organizational processes and departmental solutions, and have a very intentional examination of the Excel based solutions that have been developed over time, and see if there is an opportunity to move them to low code / no code solutions (Excel formulas power the language of Power Apps called PowerFX), and maybe through that process identify champions for innovative change.
2. Look towards the future of innovation, and how you can encourage and empower users with an approach to generating new applications that are born from a desire to innovate on existing processes.

In wrapping things up, I am excited about what the five years and beyond will deliver in terms of user generated innovation, its a topic very dear to me, and if anyone would like to pursue this thought further, then please let me know.