Creating Innovative Ideas
Innovation or creating new ideas is an essential activity and is the life blood for any company, organisation or person if they are to be successful in creating new services and products or sharing knowledge to increase their profits, share-price or contribution to society. Innovation can be seen as something that does, rather than something that is. For something to improve there has to be change, people have to change how they make decisions or choices and make them fast through real time collaboration. When this happens innovation has taken place. However, collaboration is just one aspect of this process and is part of an overall cycle that I call the 4C’s .
Innovation Roadmap
So how can we support and nurture Innovation? Over the last 2o years I have worked in a manufacturing and project based environment both as an end user and as a consultant. Looking back over that time and reflecting on what I have learnt and experienced, there are four key activities that come to light in making changes, creating opportunities, moving forward, being innovative. They are what I call the 4C’s:
- Connecting – now that we have a hybrid way of working (office and remote) you have to be able to connect to people, to other organisations and businesses to innovate both inside and outside your “business social network”
- Collaborating – by connecting you need to develop collaborative culture and behaviours, co-create joint ways-of-working and a place to collaborate, supported by visual collaboration tools – whether it is at the water fountain, in a meeting, workshop or online.
- Creating – through collaborating you start to create ideas and more importantly co-create these ideas, so that there is alignment, understanding and a consensus with the people around you in the form of an Innovation Roadmap and Management Platform for example.
- Communicating – having great ideas need to be shared and communicated real-time through your business collaboration network, so that you can connect with your “audiences” to gain feedback, comments and insight in order to improve and implement your ideas.
By reconnecting, the cycle is repeated again in an agile and continuous improvement way, creating new opportunities and value for your business, partners and stakeholders within your “business collaboration network”.
Keep your innovation process simple
For many of you who work in highly regulated industries such as the Life Sciences, Financial Services, Health and Safety, Power Generation or Construction for example, being innovative can be very challenging. Having worked in a few of these sectors mainly within the Life Sciences and Construction industry, there is a considerable amount of regulation that has to be legally adhered to.
However, you do have what I call the “Work Prevention Departments” (WPD). They would tell you why you could not do something, or you have do do X,Y and Z before you could do A but it would have to be done in the most bureaucratic or non added value way possible. In my experience, responding to issues or new compliance requirements was resolved by putting more procedures, forms, paperwork and checks in place. It was like layering band aids on top of one another such that the whole process becomes so complex and difficult to complete – a sure recipe to stifling if not killing innovation.
The result is that you become a compliance organisation rather than a creative, innovative organisation.
Collaborative Risk Management
For the Life Sciences, especially now where product pipelines are under constant pressure, innovation is key to new drug discovery and 2nd generation (ever greening) of existing products. Yet this innovation is monitored under a microscope by highly regulated government organisations all over the world, including their own compliance departments.
This is further compounded with proposed changes here in the UK such as Value Based Pricing (VBP). This looks at the outcomes/performance of a drug and is priced accordingly. If this is priced incorrectly, what is the incentive for pharmaceutical companies to innovate and develop new medicines?
Construction innovation
Within the construction industry off-site construction has many advantages and has developed new innovative solutions that address cost, time and importantly sustainability issues. Yet there is still a hesitation to embracing this type of innovative construction.
What is the issue about taking risks?
One of the main reasons I believe is the risk associated in taking new, different or bold decisions. “No one ever got sacked for choosing IBM” was a remark that I have heard several times.
Innovation can struggle to exist, let alone thrive if the leadership, trust and empowerment of people is not part of the core values of an organisation. By collectively connecting, collaborating, creating and communicating, you can adopt a collaborative risk management approach to foster new ideas, help to share problems and reduce the risk collaboratively, rather than leaving it just up to the leadership team. Who after all, are sometimes so far removed from the “coal face” is part of the reason why they don’t make those decisions!
Waiting and seeing what happens is too late. Someone else will take that lead position by acting on that great idea.
Become a High Performing Innovative Business
By taking this 4 C approach as part of your overall visual collaboration strategy, it will help you to improve your productivity and accelerate your innovation so you become a creative, high performing collaborative organisation, whilst still operating compliantly.
Free 14 Day R-IMP Trial
To see how you can improve your innovation process simply book a call to discuss to see how R- IMP: Roelto Innovation Management Platform can help you create ideas, organise and prioritise your ideas to convert into projects and start delivering successful outcomes for your business.
Best regards,
Jason
