How to find it outside
In a company with over 60,000 employees, there is for sure an abundance of innovative solutions for clearly defined business/customer problems. In some cases, innovation sessions can help to generate new ideas by tapping into the collective capacity for innovation.
Still, it may not be smart to limit the generation of innovative ideas to our own employees only. After all, many of the smart people in the world do not work for one specific company. It is also important to be open to learn from other companies. A few examples of how we got inspiration from outside the company:
Lectures. We invited or visited experts on innovation to share examples of how other organizations innovated.
- Example: Manuel Sosa, Associate Professor at INSEAD, shared with a team of our Asian Innovation Leaders how the government of Singapore created a nice ambiance in a formerly grim government agency where people had to go to obtain a work visa. The agency now resembles a luxury hotel lobby.
Connect with peers. In some countries, teams of employees met on a regular base with peers from companies in other industries. By exchanging each other’s business challenges and how they addressed them, new ideas came up that could be experimented with.
- Example: the team in Israel met every month for an afternoon of informal discussions with colleagues from an electric car start-up company.
Desk research. Teams of young, promising employees got an assignment as part of their accelerated development program. They were briefed in depth on a specific business/customer issue and were then asked to research publicly available databases on how other companies had innovatively solved a similar problem. The team then performed a quick experiment to test the solution for one of our brands.
- Example: one team needed to find an innovative solution to help diabetic patients better adhere to their treatment, because they just forgot to take their daily pill. The team researched how multiple consumer brands increased brand loyalty, a similar concept as adherence.
Open innovation. Specific business challenges were identified and innovative ideas were solicited externally via social media. The finalists were brought together in a shark-tank like event. The winners got resources to perform an experiment together with internal brand teams.
- Example: The InnovationFactory initiative in the Mid-East Africa region grew in importance and impact over 5 years
Open & collaborative innovation. Through partnering with another company, we brought together two sets of complementary capabilities and problems and then asked the community to come up with innovative experiments. Winners were selected by experts from both companies and got funding to further develop/commercialize their solution.
- Example: our company was interested to increase support for diabetes patients. Amazon (AWS) was interested to pursue opportunities for Echo in healthcare. The Alexa Diabetes Challenge aimed to incent upstarts and individual developers to create apps that harness Amazon’s Alexa voice-enabled technologies particularly for patients recently diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. The $125,000 prize attracted 96 submissions from researchers, software companies, startups and healthcare providers.
Some of the key succes factors for these external innovation approaches included
- a dedicated internal project manager to promote the initiative, make connections, create trust, manage internal approvals/compliance, track,…
- a very specific description of the problem to be solved. This helped to provide focus in the selection process and to measure succes of experiments.
- an internal team or expert, who was committed to collaborate with the external innovators. This ensured appropriate focus on the business problem, helped with customer insights and facilitated internal adoption/scaling.
As “Ryunosuke Satoro said:
“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I encouraged internal teams and employees to also look outside the company for inspiration. I shared examples like the ones above and supported colleagues who tried new external collaboration initiatives.
More about this topic: Nine habits of the best collaborators
Please share your thoughts!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele
