Collaboration for innovation across divisions
Many wars have been won through “divide and rule”. Successful innovation in corporations is just the opposite: “collaborate and win”. When employees from different departments meet and bring together their expertise and networks, magic can happen.
In practice, it’s a bit more complicated. How to find the right collaborators in the corporate maze? How to secure sponsorship from leaders in other divisions? How to reward collaboration across divisions?
An example. The IT organization had created a small team (3 people) in the IT hub in the Czech Republic. Their assignment was to create innovative, structured IT experiments in healthcare, based on cutting edge technologies. They did develop many cool experiments, based on their views and assumptions of global healthcare challenges. Only, they had no way of executing their experiments, as the “customers” were managed by the commercial silo.
The IT silo knew the technologies, but not the company’s priority customer needs. The commercial organization knew the customer, but not the cutting edge technologies. A perfect mismatch. A perfect opportunity.
As I got to know this IT team of passionate experts, I connected them with those innovators in the commercial teams that had technological solutions in mind and who otherwise likely would have contracted with external IT vendors. This collaboration worked: they generated several successful innovative experiments, which then were scaled by the commercial organization, using IT developed platforms to facilitate the scaling.
- A commercial colleague in Brazil had an idea to solve a vaccines awareness challenge with “near field communication”. After connecting her with the IT team, they jointly experimented and ended up developing a WiFi based solution.
- Colleagues in France and in Saudi Arabia were engaging customers with VR. By connecting them with the IT team, they learned from each other and accelerated the experiments. In addition, the IT team developed a platform that shared all company VR solutions, separating visuals from audio, so that other countries could easily use the existing VR visuals and add audio in their language.
- A colleague in Dubai wanted to solve a hospital customer challenge with a robot/AI. Connecting him with the IT team helped to develop a rapid prototype to gather customer feedback.
The success of this team drove the IT leadership to create similar IT teams in other geographical areas, to accelerate collaboration with commercial teams and global customers in those regions. Some colleagues even “jumped” from the IT organization into an innovators role in the commercial one, increasing understanding of both silos, identifying new opportunities for collaborate and fostering network strength.
After a while, it was no longer necessary for me to make the connections: commercial innovators naturally connected and collaborated with the passionate, non-commercial innovation teams.
As Pearl Zhu said:
“Silo builds the wall in people’s minds and creates the barrier in organizations’ “hearts.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure to identify innovation teams in other, non-commercial divisions and connected them with the commercial innovators. I promoted the results of those collaborations and the value of the non-commercial teams across the corporation, to increase leadership sponsorship, to generate broad awareness and to increase collaboration for innovation.
More reading about this topic: Don’t Break Down Silos, Connect Them and Making collaboration across functions a reality
More of these blogs? Click here: Wim Vandenhouweele
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