Making Innovation Everyone’s Job

FACT:  Whirlpool’s innovation pipeline has improved from $10m in 1999 to $760m in 2005 to over $4B current day.

If Whirlpool can do this then, so can any organization. They did this, not through launching an i-Pod, but by systematically looking at all areas of its business and encouraging innovation from ‘everyone, everywhere, everyday’. It is our observation that organizations believe that innovation begins and ends with product ideas.

For innovation to have payoff – for it to generate sustainable organic sales and profit growth – it must be integrated into how you run your entire business. We think ideas are not the problem; it is the inherent ‘blockers’ that organizations unwittingly place in front of employees day in and day out. It is now time to move from the rhetoric to reality!

It is hardly surprising that innovation has become the new mantra of CEO’s everywhere. In our suddenly sober world, there are few alternatives to innovation. To get a depth of understanding and provide you insights into the innovation capabilities of your organization we have looked at the eight enablers of innovation performance.

Whilst these enablers highlight the opportunities it will not transport the growth. It is the people who will do that through embarking on innovation for everyone and everywhere. The real and long-term capability is reached only when this core competency becomes a part of the DNA of the organization.

Innovation Enablers

 

 

 

 

Innovation Descriptors

LEADERSHIP

Leaders of innovation cultures must practice and role model the behaviors and skills of innovation themselves. Leaders consciousfly create the conditions to promote innovation and weave these into the culture. It is your job as a Leader to make it happen.

STRATEGY

Innovation cultures are grounded in a clear definition of what innovation is, an understanding of how innovation contributes to achieving the vision and a day-to-day translation into actions and target. It is about making bold choices of where to play and how to get there.

SKILLS

Innovation cultures are grounded in a clear definition of what innovation is, an understanding of how innovation contributes to achieving the vision and a day-to-day translation into actions and target. It is about making bold choices of where to play and how to get there.

SYSTEMS

Innovation is hardwired into the performance management systems in innovation culture. Innovation cultures are swift to move people, money and time around to work on great ideas. To do so organizations need to set up markets for capital, ideas and talent to allow resources to flow freely unencumbered bureaucracy.

STRUCTURES

The structure of an organization (internal & external) aligns the energy of the people and provides flexibility and opportunity. It can be inward oriented or it can be opened up to fresh ideas from the outside. Both are enablers of innovation as one size doesn’t fit all. Structure can make a big difference in the effectiveness, efficiency and success of innovation.

PROCESS

In innovation cultures, the innovation process adds momentum and energy making innovation easier, not getting in the way. Innovative organizations develop processes that encourage observation, questioning, collaboration and experimentation. Doing innovation right means developing a repeatable, scalable and consistent way of converting ideas into results.

PEOPLE

Innovation is a Team Sport. People are the raw material of innovation cultures; energy is generated by innovators and destroyed by cynics. We believe everyone can be creative. We just have different strengths/preferences. Accordingly in innovation cultures, everyone believes they have a role to play.

PHILOSOPHY

Innovation cultures are rife with stories celebrating and learning from both their successes and failures. The environment stimulates and facilitates innovative behaviors. The mantra of innovation from everyone, everywhere is more reality than rhetoric.

TYPICAL PROGRAMS

Idea Detective (4 Day Program)

Stuck in a rut, bored, dissatisfied, uninspired? Feel like it is Groundhog Day? Got a problem to solve you don’t know how to solve?

Isn’t it amazing the popularity of the detective genre? It cant be acting (unless you love the stare of David Caruso). What makes these detective shows (Columbo, CSI, Criminal Minds and countless movies) so addictive is the effortless way in each episode they solve some grizzly crime in less than 60 minutes.

Following the same steps … so can you!

Our equivalent of solving a murder is finding a solution for a gnarly problem.

What if you could find a way to become incredibly successful in your career and have ridiculous amounts of fun doing it?

What if you became a master at problem solving and could apply that to every aspect of your life? What if you could make it happen … right now? Well you can if you enlist to be an Idea Detective.

What you will get?

A practical toolkit and a flexible process that you can apply to everything from big projects to everyday challenges. We are all born creating machines – we’ve just forgotten how to use our natural inventiveness. The Idea Detective pours our most stimulating and playful techniques into a process that reunites you with your imaginative genius. We guide you through the Storytellers working principles of genuine creativity that emulate the greats such as Columbo (Define, Dig, Discovery, Develop and Decide).

It is a world class learning experience that is fun, high energy and interactive.

Who is it for?

• Everybody for whom problem solving is core to their job
• Everybody who wants to be ‘insightful’ everyday
• Teams of people who want to improve or replace the way they currently generate and support new thinking and feed their innovation pipeline
• Created to enable a marketing team to participate together and establish common ways of working with a unified language, standardized tools and one simple process

Outcomes

• A highly experiential understanding of the process and behaviors of problem solving
• Greater self awareness and understanding of the behavioral and process related blockers of problem solving
• A shared understanding, language and process for a team
• A practical immersion of problem solving and its role in driving brand and business growth
• Tools and techniques to develop powerful ideas to grow your brand and your organization
• A toolkit for defining your challenges, generating new, exciting insight opportunity and running fast and effective idea sessions
• An understanding and experience of the essential behaviors needed to bring the process to life
• An understanding of what sustains an innovation culture in the long run
• A practical understanding of how to make innovation work for your business
• Techniques to help you plan, create and commercialize winning innovation
• How to generate creative new product and service ideas and express them in compelling concept statements

MASTER PRACTITIONER PROGRAM

What is it?

A 5 day advanced course aimed at developing confident facilitators of creativity/innovation. Tools and techniques for ‘energy’ mastery and state development.

Who is it for?

• Those who have attended our creativity and innovation master classes and want to take their learning’s to an advanced level
• People who are passionate about Innovation and want to become an “Innovation Champion” within their organization

What does it deliver?

• Having conducted tons of projects what we have learnt is that the best facilitators are flexible, confident and passionate
• The workshop is focused on the individual and what works for them. It centers on self discovery through life experience and detailed personal feedback
• Delegates will leave with the ability and confidence to spread creative magic in any situation and a comprehensive understanding of the two crucial elements of creative mastery: Process and State

INNOVATION FROM ANYONE, ANYWHERE (EXECUTIVE PROGRAM)

“Innovation from Anyone, Anywhere” is a powerful, jam-packed work yearly stream that immerses Innovation Leaders in the process of innovation. From strategy to implementation, you will explore what it takes to make incremental and disruptive innovation happen. The work stream distils our innovation expertise and sparks your thinking with tangible examples of how the most admired innovation companies proactively design innovation success. You will be challenged to answer those provocative questions that are going to make the difference between death or glory for your organization.

The work stream is guaranteed to make you think differently about your innovation strategy and be more confident about how to tackle your innovation dilemmas. We start by diving into innovation strategy – what is it? What is the difference between Incremental, Big Bet, and Disruptive Innovation? What are the biggest pitfalls? We then look at how organization choose business models to drive this strategy and explore the skills and behaviors necessary to drive these models. Next we review the structures, systems and measures needed to sustain these behaviors and plumb in Innovation. We finish with examining your leadership role in driving this system.

Strategy and Structures –

This part of the work stream focuses on sources of innovative growth and delves into the core strengths and issues with incremental versus Big Bet versus Disruptive Innovation. You’ll get a full picture of the innovation spectrum and explore the implications for businesses. How do these strategies and structures impact insight search, innovation type, team formation, leadership roles, risk profile and idea management processes? What does this mean in the terms of the innovation business model to pursue?

Questions:

• Can you define your innovation strategy and how it fits with your strategic objectives?
• Does your innovation strategy challenge industry norms?
• Are your people energized by the innovation challenge? Is it evocative?

Skills & Behaviours

Most of the time, when you hear ‘innovation skills and behaviors’ you are hearing ‘how to have better brainstorms’. One-off creative thinking that happens in closed meeting rooms once in a blue moon is not going to drive your innovation strategy.

In this part of the work stream we demystify innovation and give you an introduction to and an experience of core behaviors and skills that drive creativity in your every day life and sustain you throughout the ‘idea life cycle’ to make innovation happen. It’s about clarifying what behaviors and skills you need to encourage, enforce and enable in your business to make innovation inevitable.

Questions:

• Do you proactively develop your people’s skills for innovation?
• Do you actively root out the cynics that dampen innovation behaviors?
• Do you use stories to bring behaviors to life, making it real for people?

Systems & Measures

This is about understanding what systems need to be designed to sustain and drive idea generation and idea implementation. We will then begin to apply some of the learning’s from Pionerring Companies to your own business challenges, helping you to form a picture of the gaps you must address and measures you can put in place to track your progress.

Questions

• Do you create and protect innovation space?
• Do you actively channel innovation energy?
• Are you clear on how to measure your innovation efforts?

Leadership and Roles

Senior Executives play a crucial role in the innovation game – signaling what behaviors are valued and not, proactively seeking energy leaks, embedding the innovation agenda into their business and managing the inevitable tensions that arise between today’s business and tomorrow’s.

This is a prier around what Innovation Leadership looks like and what your key considerations are when you are leading for incremental versus disruptive innovation.

If you dare to innovate, then you need to lead innovation across 3 areas: self, others, and context. We’ll explore these areas to suit external stimulus of how other top innovation leaders constantly deliver against their vision of innovation and how they are and do innovation, not just say it.

You’ll gain a real awareness around what it takes to be an innovation leader and an idea of ‘key deeds’ you must take to start affecting innovation inside your organization.

Questions:

• Is your team a coherent, powerful force for innovation?
• Do you actively manage the two states of innovation – Creativity and Analysis?
• Are you clear on what you do to influence innovation, and what works/doesn’t work?