Tracking and sharing innovations
Innovation is dynamic. Innovations can start every moment. They change continuously. They fail frequently. Multiply this activity across 100 countries, 10 brands, 5 divisions and its clear that an innovation leader cannot manage this number of initiatives with an Excel spreadsheet.
The simple solution is to buy one of the many off the shelf software programs and roll it out across the organization. It’s fast. It has been tested. It looks professional.
However, the software program may not address specific needs. Does it help the innovation leader to identify new innovations, to prioritize innovations, to track ongoing innovations, to manage Innovation Challenges/competitions, to connect innovators, to facilitate Open Innovations, to scale successful innovations, to share learnings from successes and failures, …?
The approach I took was to leverage an existing, internally developed, software program (for customer related programs). The benefit was that the tool was already tested and actively used in a large part of the company, so it was a small step to expand its objective and to scale it to the rest of the company. The IT organization had developed the tool and was thus directly engaged into the innovation activity and championed the tool within the IT organization. This stimulated collaboration between two key divisions of the company: Commercial and IT. The disadvantage was that it took longer to integrate innovation in this tool than if we’d have bought an innovstion specific software off the shelf.
All innovators were asked to enter their innovations, in whatever innovation stage they were, into this tool. The main purpose was to share innovations and to stimulate ideation. When we identified duplications, we encouraged innovators with similar ideas to collaborate.
The tool was promoted through the innovation leader networks, through senior leadership and through Innovation Challenges (the only way to compete was to submit innovative ideas via this tool). When we identified new innovations, the first 2 question were: “Did you check if it’s already already in the tool?” and “Did you enter yours already in the tool?”. We kept the template as simple as possible, to avoid it would become a disincentive to share innovations.
Gradually, more functionality was added, e.g. a way to copy successful innovations and adapt them for local situations, a repository of innovation-stimulating tools, learnings from successes and failures, a directory of innovation leaders, videos of internal TED-like talks.
As Steven Johnson said:
”If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure that everyone knew about the tool and was comfortable to use it. User feedback was used to continuously improve the tool.
More reading: Innovation Software
Do you have any experience with these kind of tools? Please share below!