Güntner's Innvotation Wheel

Yesterday, I was invited by Güntner, a company specialized in supplying heat exchangers to participate as a shark in their Shark Tank at Planetario Alfa, at Monterrey. For 10 months, diverse teams from USA, Mexico and Brazil, had been developing all sorts of ideas of how their company can innovate. People from production, marketing, finance and other areas worked together to come up with concepts. These ideas converged into sixteen projects that were presented in one day, evaluated in this Shark Tank event so at the end three projects were awarded. I had the privilege to be part of this evaluation process along people with huge experience and different expertise than me. For me this was a tremendous learning experience about how an organization can reinventing itself by leveraging on the innovation potential on its employees.

Innovation, that word associated with genius -sometimes crazy- individuals or R&D departments with lasers and Frankenstein monsters, can be misleading. As much as we love innovation, we have to be honest about the couple of myths talking about it comes with. For individuals in big organization, a myth can be that if you are not in a department called "innovation" or if your position tittle does not include the word like "innovation leader" or "innovation evangelist-what-does-that-even-mean" you don't have the possibility to innovate. Most of you might agree with me on the fact that this is nonsense, everyone can innovate from their standing point. In fact, our current life style which we could already categorized as pretty futuristic is a result of millions of innovators that have been innovating since thousands and thousands of years. The challenge is how, as a company of thousands of people, can we gather all the innovation potential of all employees together, and create a huge innovation wheel that spins and keeps spinning, as Everardo Gomez from Güntner Mexico said last night: Innovation is a heavy stone wheel that we push all together, we don't know which hands are the one that makes it move, but all we know is that as long as we all keep pushing it, we can keep it spinning.

As I mentioned, I'm very thankful for the team for inviting me, I learned a lot and I want to share with you one of my main reflections about last night:

It is not about the winning idea.

Did the winning team had the best idea? Will that idea particularly disrupt the industry? Change the world? Maybe, I hope so, but that's not the point. What happened there at Güntner, is that people from all the organization had the opportunity to raise their hand, make their case, then they were listened and they even had the guidance to evolve their concepts. To the point that people who work at the production floor had the chance to pitch their project to the Sales Chief Officer of the company. And now, the organization is working on implementing those ideas. But what is more important than those ideas, is that and organizational mechanism started, the wheel started spinning. The challenge now is to keep that wheel spinning.

It's about trust.

In order for the wheel to keep spinning, the organization needs to keep trusting this innovation mechanism. For every individual in the company, it should be evident that if he has a good idea of solving an operational or business need, and if he raises his hand, that there is a process where he can have the space to foster that idea. That if that idea makes sense in the current organizational context, that idea will be supported and even will receive help to make it grow. Lastly, everyone should trust that if his concept makes business sense for sure it will be implemented, and even if that person does not follow up on it, he will be recognized for sparking it. As long as people keep trusting this mechanism and business leaders are effective at communicating the company challenges, the innovation projects will keep coming. And the wheel will be spinning and spinning. 

This for sure needs transparency, and loads and loads of work. Writing about it is surely easier than doing it, but what I got to learn about Güntner team is that they are willing to challenge their status quo, and with no doubt we might be hearing more from them.

Thanks for reading, remember to follow and comment!

Aarón.