Six ways to approach Innovation - Innovation in-house, traditional approach.

Innovation in-house, traditional approach.

With the traditional or evolutionary approach, innovation initiatives are distributed among the whole organization. There is no central unit or formal Head of Innovations, innovations are part of every business unit’s endeavors.

Internal initiatives encouraging innovations focus on everyone’s ability to come up with new ideas and often offer a well defined and guided process on how to work with unusual and innovative ideas on their path from the drawing board to a sustainable business idea.

Decision making usually follows the hierarchical (line of business, LOB) chain of command or inclines towards an innovation committee, where a final go/no go is given. With the usual chain of command approach, any company must deal with the fact that middle management, due to inherent risk aversion, is often perceived as the show stopper for innovations.

 A fundamental prerequisite for an all-employee innovation framework to work is to create and maintain a culture supporting unusual and out-of-the-box thinking while incentivizing employees to take part. Awarding proactivity and efforts leading to successful innovations seem like a straight line to walk, but brings unexpected challenges.

Some of the most interesting innovation supporting tools include:

Adobe’s Kickbox Foundation is a methodology in corporate innovation to activate employees and create valuable business cases for the company. The methodology was invented by Adobe, further shaped by Swisscom, and adapted and implemented by thousands of companies. The Kickbox Foundation provides a space to get Kickbox open-source material from Adobe and Swisscom and exchange thoughts with other Kickbox practitioners.

 In general employees can volunteer to receive an innovation box with creative tools and a $1,000 prepaid credit card to fund any new projects they desire. The “Kickboxers” then present their ideas to their executives and their ideas can lead to full-fledged business plans.

Creating a Culture of Innovation shows eight ideas that work at Google. Those ideas: Think 10x, Launch, then keep listening, Share everything you can, Hire the right people, Use the 70/20/10 model, Look for ideas everywhere, Use data, not opinions, and Focus on users, not the competition … are designed to encourage interactions between employees within and across teams, and to spark conversation about work as well as play.

Disney Brainstorming Method: Dreamer, Realist, and Spoiler. Film producer and innovator Walt Disney used to think-up and refine ideas by breaking the process into three distinct chunks. The dreamer, the realist, and the spoiler (or critic). By compartmentalizing the stages, Walt didn’t let reality get in the way of the dream step. The realist was allowed to work without the harsh filter of a spoiler. And, the spoiler spends time examining a well-thought idea… something with a bit more structure.

Choosing the right way to approach Innovation.

Whatever way you choose, style you adopt, do not be afraid to re-evaluate your choice on a regular basis. Doing innovations is not your every-day business process that can be honed to simplicity and perfection. As your innovation maturity evolves, you might find that your current innovation style no longer suits your needs. None ever said that you can not use several different approaches at the same time.

Different ways of doing innovations have different pros and cons. Knowing those is fundamental in your decision making. Decisions based on facts and experience of others might help you to leverage other’s success and get around their mistakes.