Two key elements of Innovation

It’s a fast-paced world out there these days, and standing still is a good way to get run over. That makes innovation more important than ever. Whether you’re trying to identify new products or services, save money, or improve efficiency, innovation is the best way to increase your competitive advantage.

But most companies lack even the most basic structure to generate innovation. Here are two things that basic structure requires:

1) Ideas! And not just from the managers. Ideas should come from all levels--just offer a reward and see how many you get (it doesn’t even have to be a big reward). [Interesting anecdote: The military once offered its members 1% of the first year’s annual savings for innovative ideas which were implemented. They stopped the program because too many of their key non-coms were retiring on the millions of dollars awarded.]

One free way to foster innovation is to make it one of the job objectives evaluated for each person’s annual review. You can even challenge your vendors to submit ideas. Think about asking for different types of ideas in different years. “What would make us more efficient?” or “How can we save money?” or “What would make our job easier?” for example.

Publish the ideas in an (internal) forum available to your employees. You’ll reduce duplication and encourage synergy (“Instead of this, what if we did that…”)
2) An evaluation system: You won’t be able to implement every idea you get. Nor should you. So you need a system to evaluate and prioritize ideas. Two very basic measures are relevance to your corporate goal(s) and projected return on invested resources. Ideas should not necessarily be ranked on how well they make use of current organizational resources or expertise--that may be too limiting.

Make sure employees know the evaluation criteria. Over time, they will begin pre-filtering their own ideas, improving the quality of the suggestions you receive.

Final thought: Wouldn’t it be neat if some of our government agencies did this?

Your CMO has been involved in innovation for over 30 years. If you want to jumpstart your innovativeness, get in touch!