Does your organization struggle to live up to its ambitions to be innovative? While driving innovation is often cited as the cornerstone to an organization's core values, mission, vision and/or goals, it is difficult to bring to fruition, not because of lack of desire but rather, understanding what it means to be an innovative company.
If your company is claiming one of its core values to be innovation but does not invest in experimentation or does not promote an "MVP" (minimum viable product) mentality, then it is most likely facing an uphill battle. Innovation does not occur organically. It is not something that simply emerges from a great culture or great people. It needs to be cultivated and nurtured through practical and tangible ceremonies and actions. For example, hackathons are contests that present real business problems to a group of employees. The employees select a problem they would like to tackle and self-form into teams to solve them. They bring together diversity of experience, thought and skills to create innovative solutions. At the end of the hackathon, the teams present their solution to a panel of judges who rate it based on various criteria (ease of implementation, innovation, value to business etc). Some organizations run these hackathons on weekends or promote them as things employees can do in their spare time but I would argue the organizations that are serious about making innovation work invest in making this part of their day-to-day operations. They carve out 3-5 days per quarter to run these hackathons and then move the top ranking solutions into production as an MVP. Product managers then take over to create a product plan and backlog to improve upon the innovation based on the voice of the customer and business value. This is a great example of how to make innovation part of the corporate culture. It empowers employees at all levels to experiment, collaborate and solve problems by tapping into their creativity and problem solving skills.
Now, here's an example of how not to promote innovation... I once worked for a company that wanted to be innovative. It struggled to tap into the potential of its employees. In order to create a culture of innovation, they decided to appoint two senior leaders as an "Innovation Committee". They requested that any employee with a good idea should submit a summary of the idea and the business problem it would solve and an analysis of the benefits it would bring to their manager. If the manager agreed with the idea, it was sent to the Innovation Committee. The Committee would then evaluate the submissions and decide which ideas were worth pursuing. In my opinion, this was the worst way to try and transform the organization to be more innovative. Firstly, the Committee was an obvious bottleneck. The model assumed that these two people were good judges of what would deliver the most innovation and value to customers and the business. The problem is, diversity of experience, skills and thought was limited to two senior leaders and this created an ideation bottleneck. Secondly, this model is more time consuming and costly to get to a working proof of concept. There were many tollgates and approvals. Junior level employees had to run their idea through multiple levels of management to even make it to this Committee. Brilliant and practical solutions could easily be squashed by one manager who didn't agree or who felt threatened by what was being proposed. Lastly, this model encouraged moving a fully developed solution into production... a model we all know never works. It is impossible to anticipate and assume every business nuance is covered. This is the core reason why almost all software development companies moved from Waterfall to Agile. They realized that the best way to develop a solution was to work with the users/customers while developing it... not after.
If an organization is serious about making innovation part of its culture and value proposition, it has to invest in pragmatic and practical practices that enable employees at all levels to collaborate and deliver innovative solutions while promoting a culture of experimentation and listening to customers. Hiring great people is obviously critical as well, but even with the best people, a company can struggle to be innovative if it does not provide the right operating model to maximize their potential and contribution.
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