survey your company

Zone 1 – Innovation Infancy

Either the organization just started their innovation initiative with something like a “suggestion scheme” or the company does not see the importance of innovation and will never embark on such a road. Ideas from the suggestion scheme are never matured and frustrations are high.

The company has very little in place to get innovation started. Although not doing all the required actions at the moment, it does not mean that this organization is not ready to start on a path of innovation. Such companies would have the unique opportunity to start with a clean slate. They might already have practices such as cross-functional quality improvement meetings in place and they know what it means to do a Continuous Improvement project. Fear for losing their jobs and/or having to reskill to keep a job in the organization. R & D department, PM practices.

Suggested actions
Find a sponsor in the company that would be prepared to take on the challenge of an Innovation Initiative.

• Get the sponsor to check the level op potential support form various divisions.
  Get division heads to agree to start with an ideation system.
• Formalize the suggestion scheme and add importance to it by incorporating it into a formal ideation system.
• Provide basic and later more advanced education and then eventually training in innovation practices.
• Select certain suggestions from the ideation system and provide these as challenges to specifically appointed teams.
• Work with this specific plan and after six months take this survey again to check progress and then to graduate to the next level of company wide support for Innovation

Zone 2 – Innovation Conversion

Your existing continuous improvement programs are standing you in good stead and should be used as the springboard and catalyst to make innovation graduate into the next level of effectiveness. You might still have certain procedures, policies, and processes that could negatively influence your company efforts for improved innovation applications.

Suggested actions
If you do not have a sponsor for innovation in your company yet then get one and start working on the following challenges:

• Identify and approach company “opinion leaders” to buy-in to the initiative and particularly to push it into the next level of effectiveness.
• Provide training to innovation champions and get them to spread the benefits of innovation to the rest of the organization.
• Improve company procedures and policies to facilitate the improved use of innovation actions – remove whatever red tape that might still be present in the system.
• Implement a formal feedback, reward and recognition system for innovation.

Zone 3 – Innovation Transformation

The company is adopting new ideas and the innovation project is starting to produce some tangible results. However the results are not what we would ultimately like to see happening. There is still further scope for “breakthrough” innovations and we also believe that this could be more widespread in the organization. Management is supporting the initiative and employees are starting to use the various ideation vehicles for contributing ideas to the company. Motivation for Innovation is fairly good at this stage. Conversion of ideas, Walk the talk, reward and recognition system

Suggested actions
Get top management involved in a more tangible way. Let them speak about company successes from the podiums, in meetings and presentations. Let them motivate more widespread use in the company. Get them to give status to this initiative in a similar way in which the company continuous improvement practice is enjoying. If the company does not yet have innovation champions and/or facilitators, go ahead and appoint a few of them and provide them with the necessary training to spearhead the breakthrough innovations the company is looking for. Also start to provide innovation training to more key people to spread the use of day to day and more significant innovations applications throughout the company.

Zone 4 – Innovation Enterprising

This company is enjoying enviable successes regarding innovations. This company is not only seeing innovation as a possible continuous improvement strategy, but also as a strategy for survival and good potential future growth. Regular recommendations are made to management and a good percentage of business cases are accepted and implemented successfully.

The process is working for most people and employees in the company are very aware of the successes because of all the publicity that the innovation teams enjoyed. Successes are celebrated and the benefits of innovations are flowing through to the employees working at the first line of service and other customer contact areas. Employees are starting to embrace change as a given and a strategy for growth rather than fear. Good decision making culture, spending money on innovation training.

Suggested actions
The following are suggested actions to make your company into the ultimate state of breakthrough innovation practices:

• Start spreading innovation to other non-core disciplines.
• Do what ever would be necessary to cement the innovation practices and start to provide benefits to company employees involved in innovation exercises. Create a culture whereby employees are eager to volunteer for innovation exercises.
• Motivate a higher level of ideation to all in order to further improve the ratio of number of suggestions per employee.
• Provide specific company challenges to be addressed that would propel the company in a highly competitive state. Look for highly ingenious products and develop lucrative new markets.
• Start a yearly Innovation gala where public recognition and rewards are done in a very public recognition way. Create innovation champions and let it be known that they are innovation champions.

Zone 5 – Innovation Inventiveness

Your company has reached the level of self-actualization and is doing well in the market. You are getting known as an innovative company and articles are starting to appear where your company is mentioned as a leader with new products and niche markets.

You have well trained innovation facilitators and company employees are starting to see that becoming an Innovation facilitator is one of the ways of making progress in the company. Management is encouraging experimentation and failure is accepted as a given when you are searching for ingenious product and markets.

Innovation is embedded in the official performance management system and the only threat at this stage is to guard against the pessimists and regression of the high levels of innovative actions.

Suggested actions to stay at this level of innovative practices:

• Do a regular gap-analysis on the health of the organization.
• Seek out the pessimist and convert them by involving them in innovation teams
• Establish an elite innovation team that could continue to look for nich products and markets on an ongoing basis
• Have regular guest speakers to stay abreast with the latest developments regarding innovation practices.
• Publish in formal magazines and allow company employees to speak at conferences to share the way of how they’ve reached the pinnacle of Inventiveness.
• Appoint Innovation Director and innovation department
• Train more facilitators and spread the way of innovation to all corners of the company.

IP1 – Incidental Innovation Zone

Your company has a philosophy for innovation but really do not know how to handle it yet. Your company is ten to one heavily relying on the Research and Development Division to gather ideas and then to convert these ideas into business opportunities. However, your R & D department does not have the skills or knowledge of how to do this. They are experts in research and you need to have creative ideas is would normally be outside their existing expertise framework. You might even have a suggestion scheme or a market client survey instrument but just do not know how to use this as the springboard for innovation.

Your company most probably has some kind of mature Continuous Improvement practice, but you are not experiencing the true innovation ideas coming from it. For some reason you cannot understand why your company and its employees cannot make that final transition to inventiveness.

Suggested actions
Your company has done a few things already to propagate the usefulness of innovation but your management practices are not supporting this vision. You also have a problem whereby management is not doing enough to break through the barrier that would ensure the beginning of an exciting road toward re-inventing your company. We suggest the following actions:

• Get the CEO committed and get the CEO to start the walk the talk of innovation.
• Start taking positive actions by sponsoring cross-functional innovation meetings.
• Empower the suggestion scheme – Formally screen suggestions and hand-pick those you want your company to work on. Then train people on how they can take an idea and convert this into a business opportunity.
• Provide more education on the requirements of a good and successful innovation practice.
• Appoint and train innovation champions/facilitators and get them started to facilitate the kick-off and sustaining of the innovation initiative.
• Get the organization to learn as much as possible what would be needed from the company and its managers and employees to make up a good innovation practice adequately supported my management.
• Start to tackle the “bigger” and more challenging innovation issues and opportunities in the company.

IP2 – Innovation Procedural Zone

Your company is doing well with its Continuous Improvement practices and the company has no problems to adopt and adapt new improvement ideas. This culture is very strong but for some reason you cannot convert this same success with breakthrough ideas. It is because Innovation is a different philosophy and need very specific management actions to elevate the company into the innovation orbit. This is even more questionable when you take into account that the company has a formal way and procedure of conducting innovation in the company.

You might even have Innovation embedded into the performance management system, but still the innovation successes are sporadic and the company cannot make the breakthrough to sustainable inventiveness.
Innovation is communicated and presented at various times and celebrated at occasions.

You might even have innovation facilitators trained but still we are not getting the results we though we would be getting.

Suggested actions:
We could suggest the following actions and some would either be applicable or not depending on this existing level of practice you are enjoying in your company at the moment:

• Confirm the CEO’s commitment to Innovation. Check his/her aim for Innovation and challenge this view if it is not to eventually find ingenious products/services and niche markets.
• Do gap analysis on management regarding their views on Innovation. You need them to support the view of the CEO and you need them to provide the resources to do this. Maybe they are too impressed with the incremental improvements and you need to get them to buy-in to the philosophy of breakthrough improvements.
• Formalize an ideation system and personally pick the first challenges/ideas to work on. Appoint teams formally to work these ideas.
• Train facilitators to facilitate and coach these teams to work breakthrough ideas.
• Get management to visibly support this by getting them to provide the resources and the time for these meetings to take place during work hours.
  

MP1 – Innovation Sanctioned Zone

The closest resemblance this company has to innovation is the fact that they might have a project management practice. This allows cross functional employees to meet to progress a specific project. This company is new in the area of continuous improvement let alone being in the Innovation game. They might even have policies and procedures that might be counter productive to innovation practices. Ultimately this company has no experience in innovation and does not know how to start an innovation initiative.

Suggested actions:
This company needs to improve both their management and innovation practices. Innovation is going to be seen as a threat, because the employees have not even experienced the benefits if a continuous improvement program yet. All that they have heard is that innovation could mean the closure of certain sections and that means that they might lose there jobs. This company’s best strategy would most probably be to employ a strong person that could jump-start this company into innovation, or employ a consultant to help the company to kick-start their own initiative. The following actions could be important:

• • Start with a top team session to determine an innovation strategy, structure and recourse plan.
• Educate employees on benefits with real cases and examples of success. You will have to address the syndrome of “what is in it for me?
• Implement and kick-start and Ideation program. Go all out for producing a few successes that would motivate and fuel the further application of innovation actions.
• Select and train employees with continuous improvement experience from previous companies to drive this initiative in this company.
• Select a few challenges, appoint teams to address each one and then provide a facilitator or leader to help this team to work through their first challenge.
  

MP 2 – Innovation Campaigning Zone

This company is doing well with their continuous improvement practices. Cross functional teams and the meeting of these teams to address company problems is common practice. Mentally most employees are already in an improvement mode and it should not be too difficult for this organization to make the transfer to innovation. It has a good decision making culture and they do not have any difficulty in implementation.

This company should be well poised for getting innovation results but it does not really happen as we expected it to happen and it is because this company is lacking the framework and infrastructure for innovation. It should not be difficult to convince the company staff to graduate to an innovation practice in the company. In this kind of company they are doing well enough with their CI efforts and Innovation is not really seen as a serious company structure mostly because they are ignorant of the potential benefits of breakthrough inventiveness.

Suggested actions:
This company basically needs to make the emotional decision that they will embark on an innovation initiative for all the right reasons. All they have to do is to put at least equal importance in this part of their business as they have in the other parts of their business. We suggested the following actions:

• Formalize innovation – Appoint an Innovation Champion and provide the necessary education to management and key employees.
• Get management to agree on innovation structure with specific actions to implement.
• Arrange for a kick-off after the bulk of education and training was delivered.
• Leverage the good experiences and key CI people to spearhead this initiative. This will send an important message to the rest of the organization.
• Appoint facilitators and get them to spearhead the innovation teams meetings to address the first innovation challenges agreed upon by management.
• Document results, communicate and celebrate successes.

Have formal reward and recognition sessions.

Zones 1, 2, 3, 4 and FreeZone is within the ZONE.

The company has a balanced approach to INNOVATION and each Zone is a progression on the previous one.

• Zone 1 – Innovation Infancy Zone
• Zone 2 – Innovation Conversion Zone
• Zone 3 – Innovation Transformation Zone
• Zone 4 – Innovation Enterprising Zone
• FreeZone – Innovation Inventive Zone
• IP 1 – Innovation Incidental Zone (Ad Hoc innovation)
• IP 2 – Innovation Procedural Zone (little inspiration and a lot of perspiration)
• MP 1 – Innovation Sanctioned Zone (High level of Frustration)
• MP 2 – Innovation Campaigning Zone (Not walking the talk)