"Innovation is our Differentiator"
Are you driving it or are you merely hoping for it?
When selling services, from the individual level all the way up to the MegaProject level, there are a couple different marketing strategies:
- "We will help you make more money by helping you with your current core business."
- "We will help you make more money by helping you expand your business."
Offer your clients something your competitors don't (innovation): the ability to offer their clients a differentiator (innovation!).
"Innovation" can differentiate both the quality of service and the perception of those services.
But...
is your innovation a lingering legacy or are you committed to a culture of Innovation?
Do your services inspire a Culture of Innovation?
Does your Culture change Culture?
You've talked the Innovation talk, are you walking the Innovation walk?
You have Innovators on your staff. You have "uplifters" on your staff.
Can your innovators innovate?
Can you uplifters lift up?
Does your culture empower them or does your culture inhibit them?
It starts with your business model.
Does your business model support innovation? Does your business model provide the on-the-clock time to share value? Or must your innovators and uplifters do so in the margins?
Does your business structure ensure the sharing of learning (innovation) or do you rely (hope) for the extraordinary efforts of extraordinary people?
[[ I've often said that a Quality System is a system that ensures the quality of its outcomes without relying on the extraordinary efforts of extraordinary individuals. A Quality System allows - ensures! - "ordinary" personnel to deliver quality with ordinary effort. ]]
Does your system allow "ordinary" staff to contribute to Innovation in ordinary circumstances?
[[ Rare Events vs. Culture: do you have an occasional "Innovation Day" or is Innovation an every day attitude? ]]
Are you Innovating because of your culture or in spite of it?
How Not
One of the biggest Innovation Blockers is not allowing your Innovators to Innovate. Inspiration may only take a moment and it happens all the time. It's the followup that takes time. Locked in the head of the Innovator, Cranial Single-Sourcing is NOT scalable.
The breakdown is generally in getting the value in a shareable, scalable format. How committed is your organization to allowing the Innovator to take the time to effectively share? After hours? After the current deadline? Once the project gets some slack? After the project? Before the next project?
If the innovation gets documented, does it get promoted? How? The world will NOT beat a path to your door.
How
Innovation at its core is inspiration proactively executed. Allow your staff to be proactive. Encourage them to be proactive. Plan for it and follow through.
Fund them!
In psychology, they say "One inescapable characteristic of someone you love is that you give them your attention, your time. If you don't give someone your time, all the talk in the world won't prove your love".
In business, if you truly support something, you fund it.
Talk is cheap, but funding gets results.
Remove the Penalty for Innovation
One simple (broad) way to support innovation (or quality or excellence)) is to provide a mechanism to fund it - a general/overhead job code. "Here is a job code - that counts toward your work hours/goals - that doesn't count against your project budget and is for time that you don't have to make up."
Can it be "expensive"? Only if you are not fully leveraging the benefits. And if you're not getting ROI on the content, maybe it's not the content, it's the communication system, including uptake by your business development management.
Decouple from Inhibitors
The big inhibitor to taking the time to Innovate is the time required/dedicated to "primary responsibilities". If your primary responsibility is deadlined production, you may never "get around" to sharing. Very often "extra effort" for a production designer is... ...more production. Production experts have immeasurable value locked in their heads. If Management does not commit to sharing expertise - if it puts the sharing burden on the production expert - the expertise is locked.
Not-so-secret Secret: Project Managers are generally very biased - and evaluated - overwhelmingly towards their Project's metrics, not other projects.
Relying on "optional" stretch goals for success yields Optional (and incidental) Success.
Designing Ensured Success
It starts with vision and commitment (funding).
Like everything, to ensure a result, demand accountability.
Project Managers can be incentivized to promote expertise sharing, but their primary focus will remain their projects.
Have Staff whose primary responsibility is Innovation/Expertise Sharing.
- Set goals. Get good feedback. Measure progress. Continually Adjust.
- Sharing expertise has to be a full-breadth cultural priority.
Miscellany
Gotta Curate
Learning Systems require curating to keep them "Quick and Helpful" - the key to a highly-used system.
Ease of finding relevant content is critical. Multiple navigation paths, tags, keywords all help users find answers.
A well-designed system poorly maintained will cripple its useability.
Curating a system is essential. Bad/old/irrelevant content choke the value out of learning systems. There is a battle between "a big place for everyone" and a "100% relevant place for specialists". A capable content management system well-curated can meet both these needs. (Filtering out the irrelevant is HUGE issue generally in today's Big Data world).
Everybody's Business
Sustained innovation is result of a culture of innovation. Brilliant valuable expertise is widely distributed across the enterprise. Until it is shared - scaled - it's useless.
Only a culture that ensures the capture of expertise from the entire enterprise and effectively promotes it to the appropriate audience in a sustainable way will Innovate on a regular basis.
No individual or team - no matter how dedicated - can do it on their own. Everyone has to be looking to contribute and be empowered to contribute. The successful Innovation Team empowers and amplifies widely-sourced Innovation. They are catalysts rather than the Central Source.
Innovation is everyone's business. Nurture them, harvest their expertise.
Don't hope for it; ensure it!