Innovation Constipation? It sounds painful, is it?
The answer to this question really does depend on your definition of pain. We are not dealing with a medical condition here, just using it as a metaphor.
The employees of a business will not experience pain although stress and discomfort might feature if they have to forgo pay rises or worse, experience redundancy.
The most important thing is to think of what a lack of innovation might do to your business. Will it stop it growing (or growing as intended)? Will it lose out to competition and shrink? Will you lose out to competitors when tendering for opportunities?
A business can embrace innovation to varying degrees. See my previous post about creating a super chameleon.
At the very least, Innovation could lead you to:
- New products, services or processes
- Greater advantage over competitors (knowledge cannot be easily copied)
- First mover advantage (you will be looking externally)
- Leveraging your most precious assets (employees)
There are many more things that Innovation could do for you but this is sufficient for now.
So, without doing an in-depth diagnosis of your Constipation (the Innovation variety of course), can you see if you have a problem?
The answer is yes, and it is surprisingly easy. Innovation depends on a supply of existing knowledge and new shiny ideas. Somehow, they must meet and be investigated, prototyped or captured for future use if not useable right now.
It is possible to do a full-blown analysis of Innovation potential, knowledge usage and creativity climate for really serious businesses but a simple analysis can be done by simply answering the following questions with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.
- Do you have an effective way of capturing and evaluating ideas (a suggestion box ranks as a ‘no’ I’m afraid)?
- Does every employee have an opportunity to contribute ideas (be honest here, asking ‘have you got any ideas’? at a weekly meeting or performance review counts as a ‘no’)?
- When evaluating ideas do you ensure that all employees can provide an opinion/evidence (senior managers gating ideas is a ‘no’ here)?
- When initially evaluating an idea do you ignore cost?
- When initially evaluating an idea do you ignore risk?
- Do you have a method of assessing the value of the knowledge of employees?
Really you should be able to answer ‘yes’ to all of these questions. One ‘no’ might not be serious but the more you have, the more problems you are likely to have.
Reading through the list of questions, it might seem that I have a thing about letting everyone have a say or perhaps a downer on senior management. This is not so. These indicators are themselves indicative of many other things that might not be going quite right within your business.
If you are alarmed by the state of your Innovation Constipation or want to measure the potential of your business or organisation to innovate then please get in touch.