Millennials

Innovation champions

Large organizations typically have many company-wide initiatives going on. To piggyback on those is a very effective way to further innovation objectives.

As an example, my corporation created an HR program to accelerate the general management capabilities of very promising young employees who were less than 5 years with the company. These carefully selected employees were provided with 2 annual assignments in different countries and divisions. They also had to allocate 20% of their time to an “action learning project” in a team with 3 of their peers. The program was sponsored by the CEO.

I regularly experienced a need for extra manpower to help develop innovation stimulating programs. The above HR program was a perfect opportunity to address both their and my objectives. I was lucky to secure some of those talented employees for my innovation team and for innovation related “action learning projects”.

The young employees were able to create global networks and to engage with leaders in different parts of the company due to the global and cross-functional nature of innovation projects. They also experienced multiple critical corporate processes, like project management, collaboration within different cultures, securing buy in for developed plans and programs, following SOPs, ensuring legal approvals.

These young employees created excellent innovation programs, because they were smart, passionate and eager to learn. They brought in new, fresh, diverse thinking, were tech savvy and not afraid to experiment and push the boundaries. They also became strong ambassadors and network creators for innovation in their further careers – some of them surely on the way to become senior corporate leaders.

A few illustrations of what these young employees created:

• An innovation stimulation toolkit for country innovation leaders. As a team, they identified the top 10 challenges country innovation leaders were struggling with, like “no time to innovate”, “no budget to support innovators”. Then, they selected a few solutions for each challenge, based on how other country innovation leaders had already successfully solved those challenges. Then they published the “self service” toolkit.
• A starter kit for country innovation leaders. The objective was to create a self-service, easy to use package for new innovation leaders. This package needed to contain all the existing documents, plans, checklists, tools we had available to support country innovation leaders. Their task included testing this kit in 2 countries and developing a roll out/communication plan.
• An outside-in innovation experiment. The team was asked to deeply understand a business challenge that needed an innovative solution, by connecting with 2 country business leaders (who were co-sponsoring this experiment with me). Then they had to scan the web and other sources to find how other industries had created innovative solutions for similar business challenges. The country business leader then selected 1-2 of the best ideas to experiment in their country. The team provided support for the initial experiment phase.
• A cross-industry cross-fertilization tool. The team partnered with a major US and EU university to try to develop and test a self-sustaining database of innovations in multiple industries. This database would then serve to inspire our company to innovate based on those examples. E.g. solutions for patient adherence to medicine might be inspired by consumers loyalty to retail products. The team then tried out the database to solve specific country business challenges. (Note that both the US and EU initiatives failed, but practical learnings were gathered).

Many of these millennials continued to apply our innovation framework in their new job and continued to connect me and other innovation leaders to new networks.

As Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said:

“A diverse mix of voices leads to better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone.”

So, as Innovation Leader, each year, I made sure that new young employees were assigned to my innovation efforts. I closely mentored, supported and connected them with my networks. I shared with them the key innovation principles. I stayed in contact with most of them as they moved on to new assignments.

More reading: Innovation and How to Recruit and Retain Top Millennial Talent

More blogs? Click here: Wim Vandenhouweele

Do you have any experience with this? Please share below!