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Creating a Culture of Innovation

Creating a Culture of Innovation

by Cathy Cassidy, CEO, Martin Training Associates

Innovation has long been driven by an old paradigm of push from within technical groups, define solutions quickly and conduct rapid development with little consideration of adoption until launch. Today though, a new paradigm for Innovation cultures is stirring:

• A paradigm that is based on the principles of alignment and accountability;
• A paradigm that requires organizations to focus internally and externally and move past maintaining the status quo to achieving strategic results
• A paradigm that requires an Innovation System

Innovation System Components

Creating a culture of innovation cannot be achieved through creativity and process training alone. Innovation cultures require enterprise wide systems and practices that position everyone at every level to operate in a way that moves the entire organization towards realizing its long term strategy.

The strategic plan of an organization is simply the future vision of the organization. The “What will be” stated by the senior team. Based on this viewpoint, everything in the strategic plan does not exist today and thus is a needed innovation. Historically, organizations try to apply standard processes lower in the organization to generate creative solutions and implement projects. This methodology definitely provides a return on the investment with project teams being more effective and efficient and ideas being creative. However, this method misses the mark on supporting an organizations ability to execute the strategy.

Consider this statistics: 90% of organizations that have strategic plans fail to execute them. This is not because they don’t have the right people or enough people. This failure is often due to the lack of an enterprise wide system for strategy execution. This is where the Innovation System comes in.

An Innovation System is the enterprise wide system comprised of best practices and methodologies for conducting top-down creation and bottom-up execution of the strategic plan. Illustration 1 shows the components of a standard Innovation System. Each component is described in more detail in the table below:

 

 

Component	Description
Horizontally Focused Strategic Planning	Everything that is new in the organization is an innovation;. Given that organizations are complex matrix organizations, the strategic plan must be created with a focus on optimizing the horizontal dimension of an organization to deliver the organizational mission. Horizontally focused strategic planning begins with the mission, identifies long term and short term goals which are decomposed until innovation projects are identified.
Innovation Portfolio Steering Process	The portfolio of innovation projects that are identified through the strategic planning process are the ideas for how to deliver the strategy. In order to ensure the organization can deliver what is set out, a steering process that is focused on selecting, funding and monitoring the status of this portfolio of is needed. This process is horizontally focused and requires horizontal governance councils to be accountable for the portfolio’s results.
Proactive Accountability	If you are truly striving for a culture of innovation, then the accountability system in place must be aligned to foster this culture. Innovation is a team-based effort, that requires collaboration across functions therefore the accountability system in place, must not only support individual efforts, but team-based efforts as well, focus on lessons learned and support the calculated risk taking that is needed to truly be innovative.
Innovation Methodology	Everyone trained in the organization’s innovation process. Without a methodology innovation is hit or miss
Project Management Method	All innovations are projects. The organization needs a simple, team-based method all teams follow to manage projects.
Innovation Sponsorship	Innovation leaders lead the innovation project through one or more of the stages. They will come from today’s ranks of project leaders. Sponsors are needed to interface between the Innovation Steering Committees and the innovation leader.

 

System Components are not Enough

Having a system is a great start to imbedding a new culture. However, cultures are based on paradigms and belief systems and changing the culture already in play in the organization cannot be accomplished with processes and methodologies alone. In addition to the Innovation System, the following shifts need to made as well:

• Customer Ownership of the Innovation Effort – The failure of innovations is often caused by the lack of ownership by the internal customer or customer representative for the innovation. In order to ensure the selected solution is adopted and becomes an innovation, the customer must be accountability for the success of the development and launch since it is designed to not only solve their problem, but move the organization towards its strategy.
• Senior Leader Attitudes – For the organization to be successful at innovation, the tone must be set from the top. Leaders need to be open to new ideas, be willing to explore new paradigms and reward learning from mistakes. Leaders need to put an end to the blame game and finger-pointing and require cross-functional collaboration which requires everyone to focus on optimizing the whole organization and not just the parts.

If your organization is ready to change the culture to a truly innovative one, consider the adoption of an enterprise-wide system and move towards executing strategy in any ecomony.

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