Accelerate innovation & change in your business

Interim Chief Innovation Officer

An organization needs to constantly innovate to succeed. Innovation is about making things better, faster, or cheaper than your competition. It drives ongoing improvements and may help unleash a new idea that changes the rules. Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy. Companies need to approach innovation and change effectively and proactively.

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Creating a Culture of Innovation

Organizations need to implement policies that encourage innovation. While that may seem intuitive, many companies do little to support sharing of ideas with their compensation, management structures, and focus on productivity. Innovation needs to start at the top, with senior management developing policies and empowering staff to implement them. For example, the Internet search company Google uses a 70-20-10 rule. They spend 70 percent of their time and resources on their core business, 20 percent on related ideas, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses.

Rewarding Innovation and Change

A company needs to provide staff with an incentive to innovate. With no reward, there is no good reason for employees to suggest or try new ideas. The first step in creating an innovative organization is to include change in an employee's goals, performance management process, and compensation plan. This needs to be implemented throughout the organization. Even mail-room staff and couriers can offer a perspective and make suggestions that a vice president would easily miss.

Following Through

When an idea has been identified, the organization needs to support the idea with resources, a budget, and attention. Often an employee trying to implement a new idea must work on both the new idea and her current job. Goals need to be quantified. Will the new program increase revenue or improve productivity and reduce expenses? Calculating this provides a way to judge the success or failure of a program. Innovative organizations must support the idea throughout, which includes providing backing from management, investment in equipment and technology, staff training, and marketing support.

Rewarding Failure

Sadly, not every innovation will succeed. There are many variables involved with any innovative idea and perils both known and unknown may prevent success. Once a project is underway, it is not uncommon to discover that accomplishing the goals cost more than expected, causing the project to be cancelled. Even failed initiatives result in new knowledge, lessons learned, and limitations understood. It is also common for individual aspects of an idea to become successful on their own. Companies need to accept that although many ideas fail they still need to reward the hard-working team that implemented the idea.

Developing a Playbook

After a number of successful innovations and probably a number of failures, companies dedicated to continuous innovation and change need to develop a set of guidelines and processes. Creating a manual or guidebook that takes innovators through the process is the first step. This guide may outline how the procedure works, how opportunities are identified and chosen, as well as how they are implemented and launched. Every member of every team should be asked their opinions on why a project succeeded or failed and what they would do differently next time. These documents should be cataloged and filed for future reference.