Involve Everyone in the Innovation Process

Abstract

Challenging and involving all employees in the process will improve the for innovation and, ultimately, the contribution of RD people naturally think of ways to make their jobs easier, faster and more productive. Although these words are a truism, few R&D organizations have effective in place to solicit ideas and then implement the best ones. In short, there is no formal process for innovation. The informal process required an idea champion, usually the idea's creator, whose persistence and personal energy were required to make things happen. An effective process should include a system for encouraging employee suggestions that removes barriers and makes it easy to contribute ideas, and makes it equally easy to decide next steps for the best ideas. Any system that does this will increase the likelihood that good ideas will be submitted. Strong, visible support by leadership lets everyone know that individual thinking and ideas are valued, and allows everyone to be more involved with the business. This, in turn, establishes an improved climate for innovation. Perhaps you have been involved with systems in the past that didn't work well. Typically, these were instituted by leaders and kicked off with high visibility hoopla only to eventually fall into disuse and be quietly abandoned. One Fortune 100 company we know became so disenchanted with its system that it formally abolished it and replaced it with nothing! The Human Side Suggestion most often fail because the human side of the system is ignored, and because the added work of administering the system becomes so burdensome that it falls under its own weight. In another Fortune 100 company with a highly publicized employee suggestion system focused on cost reduction, participants were paid for their ideas. Program administrators and managers (who saw the ideas first) began stealing ideas, submitting them as their own to get the reward! Naturally, this diminished cooperation and gave employees an incentive to withhold their ideas from one another, which in turn squelched debates on the issues, another important dimension of the climate for innovation. This is a classic example of the well-known fix that backfires archetype in thinking technology (3), which could have been avoided by considering the human issues. Such behavior is not surprising to those schooled in thinking technology or in knowledge management and human behavior (4), but came as a complete surprise to the leaders. …