The Best of Killer Innovations: Key Ingredients for Innovation Success

Resuming our Best of Killer Innovation series, we look at key ingredients to build innovation success for organizations.

The Innovation Success Formula

Innovation is about translating ideas into products, services, and solutions. Ideas without execution are a hobby.  Is your organization in the business of Innovation? This episode boils it down to a simple equation. Ideas + Innovation Culture = Innovation Success.  The process starts with ideas and the management of them.  But ideas won't develop and thrive without the right culture.  Core Attributes are about setting the basis for Innovation Culture.  When you set up a good system of gathering ideas and lay a foundation for an innovation culture, innovation success ensues.

Creating Order from the Brainstorm of Ideas

The process starts with ideas coming from many sources.  Then comes the question of how to manage your ideas.  How do you log, track and rank them?  Where are your ideas today in the innovation lifecycle?  What about all the brainstorming sessions over the last few years… could you quickly put your hand on the list of those ideas?  Ideas have value over time.

The Idea Management System, Step By Step

If you believe ideas are the economy's currency, you need to manage ideas as a valued asset for innovation success.  Treat ideas as valuable asset.

What's needed in an idea management system?

Idea capture and tracking

• It is an easy way to put ideas in the system, track them over time, evaluate them, and link them to other ideas that could grow into something significant.
• Done by people on the innovation team but also open to other people in the organization who can submit an idea easily – have one place to look for all assets

Idea evaluation – some form of an idea evaluation tool that allows management to assess and look at ideas more closely

• Does everyone in the organization look at it and vote
• Use a ranking process like F-Focus, I-Ideation, R-Ranking, E-Execution
• Crowdsource feedback

The system must allow for Ad Hoc Team Collaboration

• As people submit an idea, people can search the system to see if someone has a similar idea across the organization – can team up, combine efforts and areas of expertise
• Social hub of Innovation within an organization
• Get better ideas – cross-organizational efforts – collaborations that generate exciting ideas

Supports whatever your organization's process is for Innovation

• The tool needs to match today's and even tomorrow's process
• Track ideas through the gating process your organization uses
• Follows phases of Innovation used
  A lot of tools out there that force you to follow their process – be careful – you need a tool that follows your process.

Needs to support pausing ideas

• The difference between a good idea and a great idea is not about the idea.  It's about the timing.
• Market, customer, organization, and government regulations are not ready for many reasons.
• The key is you always need the ability to pause the idea – capture it so that you can pause and pull out an idea later when the timing is right

Ability to issue challenges

• Don't run an idea management system like an electronic suggestion box – ideas will become incremental
• For breakthrough ideas, issue challenges: carefully worded questions, problems, and areas of interest put out to the general population with some form of incentive for spending time thinking about ideas/approaches that will answer or solve that in the form of ideas
• Well-constructed challenges (problem statement) generate a wealth of good ideas
• Gets org thinking – signaling where the org is going, what the direction of org is

My Experience With These Tools

Without a system or tool, you are lost

• You have to treat them as a valuable asset

Don't restrict access to the tool

• Open it up to 100 percent of your organization
• You have to trust your employees

Promote your tool

• Get people to engage on the tool providing their feedback
• This becomes the mechanism by which ideas are trained and tracked
• Promote constantly and consistently

Close the loop with the idea submitters

• If someone submits an idea, they need to hear back
• Give them feedback

Think about applying some form of gamification

• Make it fun
• Please give them a point or scoring system

Core Attributes

When I took over a new role as CEO, I set out a hundred-day plan looking at the organization and figuring out what made it tick.  I spent a significant amount of time doing one on one interviews with all the key stakeholders.  I asked them four questions:

• What should we preserve?
• What should we stop doing?
• What is it that you most hope I do?
• What do you expect I do not do?

Ninety-five percent of employees feared that the new CEO would not change anything.  They understood that some things needed to be changed for the company to flourish.  I realized that I had to build the core attributes from scratch. So, how do you do that?  The key is to help everyone understand why core attributes are so important.  What is it the team wants the organization to become?  Core attributes articulate what you stand for.  The ones we came up with are:

• We need to be passionate
• We think big and bold
• We are fast and agile
• We are a team
• We unlock individual potential
• We lead by example
• We are resourceful

Once you have captured this, you are ready to start the process.  Having the list is the beginning of the process. The senior executives must own this; the senior executives must always control this. We must manage the process to get everyone on board with the innovation culture.  It communicates the process and displays the core attributes.  Instead of telling people these are the core attributes, we published them and invited people to come in as part of group sessions.

Core Attributes Impact Innovation Success

We collected a list of core attributes employees liked and helped brainstorm recommendations for the executive team about how we could live it.  We have included core attributes in our performance management.  Employees are assessed on those core attributes at the end of the year.  The impact on the organization was beyond anything I expected.  It is not a static and never-ending process but develops a practical framework for an innovation culture that drives success.

To learn more about the ingredients for innovation success, listen to this week's show: The Best of Killer Innovations: Key Ingredients for Innovation Success.