This article is part 1 of a 5 part series where we take a deep dive into the 5 common challenge to innovation that an organization faces.
I Don’t Know…Where to Begin?
The idea of being innovative is something that I truely believe that 99.9995% of companies around the world strive for. Just think about how many times you see the word “innovative” in a corporate tagline. “We innovate for our clients…” or “[Company X], where we focus on innovation to better serve ….”
There are tons of them out there. And then think about how many times you see the opposite.
How many websites have you been on that say something like, “my great grand-father’s father did it this way. It worked for him, and it’ll still work for us.” Or “I’ll ship your part with my fastest horse first thing after the fortnight and you’ll get it before the third new moon. Be sure to telegraph me when it arrives….”
My guess is you’ve been on decidedly fewer. Or, probably none. It isn’t that nobody wants to be innovative. It’s that innovation is hard.
The challenge with innovation is that it is asking an organization to do something different than how they have been trained. Innovation asks companies to ignore the policies and metrics that they have in place to increase speed, accuracy, and effectiveness, in search of something that may or may not add value. So it is not surprising that one of the common complaints that we get when we work with customers is that they just don’t know where to begin.
Check out our case study, where we helped a distribution company address this very issue.
How do we Help Clients Solve the “Where to Begin” Question
Our approach to solving the “where to begin” question is by providing our partners with a recipe for how to handle innovation. Our recipe, which we call the InnoSpecting Framework, is flexible enough to be tailored to fit any organization.
“No skill to understand it. Mastery to write it.” – Arab expression for trenchant prose
What we’ve done is taken the time to master the art of continuous innovation, and we use our framework to help you apply it. We have slimmed it down to a simple three phase process, and focused on the capabilities at each phase to make it technology agnostic. And we’ve identified the roles and teams necessary to implement each phase; allowing the organization to hire for those specific skill-sets and truly own the process.
InnoSpecting Framework
Again, our framework is made of three phases. The following sections break down each phase and what our partners get out of them.
Capture
Every successful business hires dedicated and talented people. Yet only a minority of them use them to generate ideas on ways to push the organization forward. Instead the thought is it is up to the
Executives to set the direction or the IT staff to build new products or clients to let the company know where and how they can improve.
In our model, everyone listed above is responsible for identifying the next great idea. We also coach our partners on talking to other sources for idea inspiration, including:
- looking at competitors to ensure they aren’t offering something that we are incapable of.
- looking at new entrants into your market-space, as often tomorrow’s competition comes from today’s fringe use cases.
- looking at non-customers and markets that you are not currently supporting to see what it would take to grow your customer base.
In the Capture phase, we provide clients with tools and strategies to tap into those resources. And we coach our partners on how to get people excited about submitting ideas through a tailored communications plan and rewards system.
REFINE
In the Refine phase, we coach our partners on how to the ideas that have been captured, and:
- identify which have the greatest potential
- experiment with a subset of those to get an understanding of what a successful product or service may look like
- get feedback early and often from the relevant stakeholders on how and where to improve
- methodically role out the product to increase its chance of success.
Did you notice that REFINE was spelled out in capitals letters? It’s actually an acronym that we developed to make the process easier to remember. If you care to know what it is, let’s setup a time to chat.
Retire
The purpose of the final phase, Retire, is to get rid of legacy ways of doing business before they weight your team down like an anchor. This is perhaps the scariest of the three phases for our clients because we ask them to turn off systems that have been making them money for, in some cases, multiple decades. Which is exactly what happened to the company in our case study referenced above.
The issue with legacy systems is that overtime they can become a drag on your employees. And they can become a drag in multiple ways. They can become a drag financially when they take time away from money-generating activities just to keep them functional. They can bring them down emotionally when employees begin to hate that second Thursday of the month when they have to enter all those invoices into System X. And they can become a drain intellectually when employees “check out” and mindlessly go about their tasking.
To prevent any or all of those three negatives, we coach our partners on how to look for early warning signs. And then begin generating a replacement plan. If done correctly, there should not be any concern when it comes time to turn a system off because you’ll have something that better fits your organizations needs ready to take its place.
Reinforcement
To ensure that this framework takes hold, we coach our partners on how to continuously reinforce it. Which we do in two ways. One of those ways will be covered in the second part of our series that focuses on creating a culture of innovation.
And the second way is through the alignment of technology. As stated above, our framework is fundamentally technology agnostic. However, we do coach our partners on, and in some cases help them build, using technology to create guidelines. And then using those guidelines to ensure that their established processes are followed.
The most common example of a guideline is a workflow. Organizations use workflows all the time to ensure quality and consistency. We also leverage a workflow to ensure that our partners are following our framework. As ideas move from one phase to the next, our framework ensures the right teams are engaged and providing the right input. This allows the decision makers to have all of their agreed upon information in a timely manner, in a consistent format, and allows them to address another common challenge of comparing ideas across business functions which will also cover later in this series of articles.