Sean Davis

The July-August 2010 edition of Harvard Business Review has an article called “How to Stop the Innovation Wars” which discusses a common misunderstanding that the ‘innovation’ side of the house must be separate from the ‘operations’ side largely because innovation is something done by a few people and without accountability or a solid process. In my opinion, if you’re a part of an on-going business then you simply cannot innovate in a vacuum, you must involve the people responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company, involve them early on and solicit their feedback. If you want to make progress with your concepts then you’ll need to come up with a rough, repeatable process that shows how things move through your innovation pipeline. For example, how do you know where and when to innovate? A simple response of “We field suggestions from the rest of the organization through a standardized process…” is fine. So is “When we sit in meetings we listen for unspoken problems, that’s where we start to look.” You might get some funny looks, be prepared to explain what you’re listening for. Specific phrases like “We spend a lot of time/money…” are excellent ways to see bottlenecks in the organization and begin to innovate new business processes or product improvements.

Once you’ve dealt with the “Where to look” question, you must next deal with the “What’s the impact…” question. “When we heard it took a lot of time and people to accomplish X, we looked into the process and found it could be streamlined without impact to other areas of the organization. There are many questions still open but based on a very simple cost/benefit analysis we’ve discovered that we could potentially save $50,000 per year for three years.” Now, if you’re on the creative side of the thought process, PLEASE get someone from the accounting side to help you with the cost/benefit. This is where cross functional teams really come into play, you probably don’t want to get near the financials and accounting probably doesn’t want to sit and listen to other people’s problems. That’s fine as both groups have their strengths. Make full use of them.

You’re going to have to deal with the “How do you come up with new ideas to solve for…” at some point. I’ve worked with IDEO Method Cards but frankly, that’s overkill for a lot of what I’m doing. An appropriate answer might be “We followed the team around all week and found…” or “We conducted interviews with the entire staff, confirmed our original assumptions and are coming up with a detailed plan to address it. We also found two more potential time savers but we will address those after this project is completed.” Either response should work but be prepared for someone else to ask the same people what you did. Their answers and yours had better not differ by much. By the way, we all know that once you find someone who says “That’s how we’ve always done it” you’ve found a gold mine.

If you’ve done your homework and were convincing you’ll probably be asked to proceed. From here on you need a plan. If you can prevent it, don’t give up ownership – you saw the problem, you potentially see the solution, so you run with it. This might be a great time to enlist a project manager. Try to find one that leans toward the creative side if you can. Good luck, I’ve met just one in twenty years. You will need someone on your team that can lay out all the steps and put a general time line together. If you keep ownership then YOU need to report on where you are in terms of that schedule. Be prepared to explain what progress you’ve made, what your next steps are and what is still left to be resolved. Be prepared for the infinitely inept question of “When will you figure out how to…”  If you knew the answer to that you’d already have the answer and you wouldn’t be reporting that it was still a problem, right? A tactful response to this might be “It’s a complex problem, we’ve made headway, we’re confident we’ll figure it out.” If you’re really stuck on a problem, now’s a great time to ask to borrow someone for a few days. Do not get bogged down trying to fix one serious problem – get as many people across the organization involved trying to fix it as possible. Do not make it look like you put the project at risk because you didn’t ask for help early enough. Also, if it looks like you can’t fix it, then friggin’ say so.

If you generally follow these suggestions then you should be making some progress easing people’s tension with innovation teams. And that’s all you’re really trying to do at this point, especially if you’re just getting things off the ground. In my opinion an innovation team that is just starting shouldn’t have a complete methodology. You can develop that as you grow. But what you need to avoid is the perception that you work without accountability and structure. Hopefully this gets you started, if there’s things I’ve missed (definitely) or you can add something you’ve learned, by all means please leave  a comment.

Critical to any organization that is attempting to grow is a flow of ideas through that organization. This first hit me when I was reading “One Up on Wall Street” by Peter Lynch several years ago. Somewhere in there he describes that if he made 1000 investments, ten would break even. Of that ten, only one would perform well, so well in fact that it would pay for all of his other investments. It’s a similar situation for innovation, you generate thousands of ideas but only a few will pan out. Of those few an even smaller percentage will perform above expectations and pay for everything else. The problem is that you can’t predict where these ideas will come from. Flashes of brilliance can come from anyone and at anytime, you just can’t predict either. Therefore you need a process to enable these ideas to progress through the organization while along the way they are supported and enhanced by other disciplines such as Finance, Marketing, Sales and IT.

If today you don’t currently have a systematic process (having a suggestion box doesn’t count) to allow ideas or suggestions to move through your organization, here’s how to start roughing one out. First, what objectives do you want to accomplish; process improvements, new products, cost cutting measures, or all of the above? Second, what are these ideas worth to you and the organization? If you can’t put a dollar figure on them then the chances are your employees won’t value their own suggestions either. If however you’ll cough up $1,000 or more for each idea that gets to production you might be getting somewhere, especially if that idea becomes a new line of business worth several million in annual revenue. Place your highest rewards on what you considered to be the most important objectives you wanted to accomplish.

The suggestion process – this is where things can get bogged down. If it’s made too complicated then the level of effort will be to great for people to take the time to submit the idea. If it’s too simple you’ll get ideas like “let’s start making beer” which is fine if you’re a brewery, a bad idea if you’re an insurance company. In my opinion the submission should be two sections:

• What’s the general description of the product, product enhancement, cost cutting process, etc.
• How does it benefit our business or is it a potential new business

Keep the financial data out of it for now. Yes it’s important but for reasons I’ll cover in future posts, you don’t want to start there.

One of the most critical components (probably the most critical!) is the team reviewing the ideas. If you staff it fully with operationally oriented people, any new ideas you get will be met with ‘what about…?’ questions. This will kill new ideas. If you staff it with ‘what if…’ people then you’ll get some very off the wall stuff.  Instead staff it with a mixture of ‘what if…’ people and ‘what about…’ people to balance each other out. This will be covered in future posts here as well but the important part is that ideas (aside from “let’s make beer”) do not get killed off. They are put ‘in the parking lot’ for future review, they are re-submitted with more information, they are placed into the queue with the rest of the business changes, or they are fast tracked. For any of those, let the submitter know immediately, preferably along with a small cash reward, or time off, or whatever you’re using to compensate people.

Next is the actual process to get vetted ideas moving. This is another critical juncture and one where you may start to see the ‘not invented here’ syndrome preventing things from moving forward. It’s where ideas and suggestions start getting some structure and where financial models are applied, product development plans are impacted and infrastructure changes start being recognized. Weekly status reports should help the ideas continue to progress through the organization, I’d recommend them highly.

Let’s try this with an example.

Say someone in your organization had the idea to stop buying paper towels for all the bathrooms and replace them with Dyson Airblades, where would that person start?

First, answer two questions

• What: The Dyson Airblade dries hands in 8 seconds, is faster than our current air driven hand driers, and is more sanitary.
• How: The Dyson Airblade is 50% more energy efficient than what we have today, it’s more sanitary because we don’t touch anything, and is probably cheaper than all the paper towels we go through every year.

Next, this idea goes to the Review Team. For this example the team should actually assign it to someone to figure out how much is spent every year in paper towels. At that point you can’t reject the idea, compensate the employee based on how you rank cost savings suggestions. It’s probably not feasible to figure out how much power is used by regular air driers but Dyson does state that they’re 80% more energy efficient and gives you a quick web interface to estimate your cost savings. Each Airblade is about $1,200 so if you need six that’s $7,200 without installation. If you’re spending $6,000 a year on paper towels then you’re looking at a two year ROI. Sounds like there’s something here so put it in someone’s hands to oversee, demand weekly reports and push it through the organization. Once it’s installed I recommend additional, and larger compensation for the employee that suggested it. Don’t kill your ROI (unless you’re trying to make an example!) but If you’re saving $4,000 in your second year you can probably afford $200-$300 this year.

That’s it. Although this is a simple example you can probably extrapolate to larger efforts and larger benefits. Future posts will cover compensation options, refining the submission and review process, recognition for your best idea people, as well as teaching the rest of the organization to look at everyday things with a more critical eye.