What is your Innovation Process?

Innovation has become a buzzword and "cause". Yet it can be like a movie set that looks great from the front until you see it from the rear as a propped up fascade.

As Deming like to say 94% of the problems encountered are due to lack of good process, 6% involve the people. So much recently is centered around how to get our people energized to innovate. Encouragement, motivation, stimulus etc. All of these are incredibly important but let's take a closer look at process which you could argue is also heavily based on what the company culture is like. All talk and no process is indicative of the culture the leadership promotes.

So what is your innovation process? How physically are ideas generated, evaluated and put through the motions and prioritized for possible action that leads hopefully to revenue generation and profit. If you are small, start with a growth pipeline. Create an Excel sheet of ideas with a column for the probability of success and most importantly a column for the person who is responsible to investigate. Several other columns may involve scale ranking 1-10 for areas such as risk to development, investment required, time to develop, how strategic is it, profit potential etc.

The pipeline should be reviewed regularly. The simple rankings you come up with upon investigation may kill the idea from progressing to a formal product development cycle. Your pipeline realistically will have less than 5 ideas with activity if you are an organization under a few hundred people. The key is that there is activity on something and that you are meeting to discuss movement of ideas (kill it or develop some more).

The key is that when asked the question, "How do you innovate?", that you have an answer that goes back to some "process". Whatever that answer is, whether it's a simple Excel sheet or a more formalized approach is your process- good, bad or indifferent. If you can't answer the question, you know where to begin.

Innovation Quick Hits - Frozen in Fear

Are you the deer in the headlights? Frozen by fear, you stop and stare at the oncoming lights of change. The headlights keep coming and a collision is unavoidable.

If change is the headlights and we are the deer, what keeps us mesmerized on staring at the inevitiable? Get moving, get going, start looking at what your business does differently, more agressively. The headlights are moving in a direction. Where are they going? Can I move with them?

Too often we focus on the reasons not to innovate or look at our small companies from what we haven't done or can't do (the typical "we don't have the time/money"). Well guess what? No one else does either yet successes abound. To look change in the eye is a stare contest that you will lose. We need a call to action with our company cultures to lead or follow. Getting out of the way is no option either as that is avoiding the inevitable headlights on the next road we cross.

Roadkill has no capacity to make a decision and the landscape is littered with companies that have left their mark on the road of a once living and thriving organization. Graphic but true.

Any good examples out there of what has gotten you off dead center??

Innovation Quick Hits- Living on the past

Today's products/services are the result of yesterday's innovation and risk taking. Are we still living on the residuals of past success or pressing forward to create tomorrow opportunities ?

Raw Materials for Innovation

When we make product we start with raw materials. In the manufacturing world with Just-In-Time and supply chain integration, our raw material suppliers are vetted and their quality assessed, specifications analyzed, sample material inspected etc. This happens well in advance of approving the supplier for routine material purchase. How does this apply in the innovation realm? Our raw material is our people creating actionable ideas. These are not only the ones within our four walls but those we choose to engage with for innovation which includes suppliers, customers and outside sources.

If people are the raw material, how are they vetted for creating an innovation culture that leads to quantifiable results? The short answer is that in many cases you may be stuck with a raw material inventory of naysayers, "not invented here" types that if they were actual raw material vendors they might be replaced. In the company culture, we have to use what we've got and bloom where we are planted so to speak. Since we can't choose the company culture let's at least understand where people are coming from.

Here are some sample survey questions you may want to consider for an anonymous poll of your key decision makers and workers who make it happen every day. From my experience, the answers varied little from top management to the shop floor. A simple 1-10 scale defining what a 1 and 10 is for your organization (in 1-2 words each) is a easy way to gather and tally your results. Here's to the start of a great internal survey to help you understand the raw materials you're working with:

1. What do you think is your company's need to innovate it's offerings to be competitive?
2. How urgent do you think #1 needs to be done?
3. How successful in the past has your company been on innovative products/services?
4. What is your impression of the company's boldness towards taking on new ideas/innovations?
5. Is creativity/innovation rewarded at your company?
6. What is your level of optimism based on your company culture to taking action on new things?

There can be many others. What are your thoughts?

Putting the "No" in Innovation

I was reading Chic Thompson author and motivational speaker recently and a few of his thoughts brought back memories from grade school and beyond that are worth sharing. John Maynard Keynes once said "What's difficult is not so much developing new ideas but escaping from the old ones."

Innovation begins with openness to new ideas but if you think back to your upbringing, we had very few role models for innovative thinking from our educational system. When we had a question, we asked the teacher who gave us "the" right answer. In the innovative environment we ask diverse people diverse opinions for a kaleidoscope of ideas. In school we were encouraged to work alone, keep our eyes on our own paper and stay focused on the subject at hand. In the innovative environment we look on other people's paper by collaborating and sharing ideas, we form self-directed work teams and we welcome the brainstorming that our teachers used to criticize as daydreaming.

Innovation is an uphill climb for most of us because we are not used to being in environments that encourage new ideas and time to "daydream". If we are to some extent a product of our environment then we need to move towards pursuing one that encourages the "know" in innovation by putting ourselves in situations that encourage the opposite of the typical education system most of us were raised in.