How to build an innovation engine…from within
Tags: Xcelerator, Leadership, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Leadership Development

How to build an innovation engine…from within

Empower your team to be intrapreneurs, give them room to experiment, and celebrate failures

Amina Islam

In the race for relevance to future customers whose needs and desires still remain obscure, a company’s capacity to innovate is far more important than its capacity to execute. This is because technology disruptions have brought on unprecedented waves of change, making it critical for companies to ride them or risk drowning.

When resources are abundant, it’s easy to invest in building Research and Development (R&D) departments or innovation labs. You can even create clever architectural changes the way Steve Jobs did when he designed Pixar’s offices in 1986, and placed the bathrooms in an atrium at the center of the workspace. Even though some people found it annoying, as The Independent’s Archie Bland writes, “Pixar’s employees started to bump into each other. They shot the breeze. Sometimes, the chatter would yield something useful, and one of the participants would head back to her desk with a new idea.”

However, if you don’t have those luxuries, what can you do as the leader of an organization with limited resources and manpower to build a culture of innovation?

Start with your current workforce; encourage them to become intrapreneurs, give them room to experiment, and celebrate failures.

Encourage intrapreneurship

It is common for organizations nowadays to outsource innovation services, and hire consultants in hopes that they’ll provide silver-bullet solutions such as design thinking training. While these one-off initiatives do add some value, a more holistic approach to driving innovative thinking is to encourage intrapreneurship, by giving your staff the right authority, support, and opportunities.

An intrapreneur is someone you can think of as an ‘in-house entrepreneur.’ Whether they operate within the boundaries of an organization as intrapreneurs or on their own as entrepreneurs, they are always noticing and acting on opportunities, utilizing their resourcefulness to overcome obstacles, and thinking of ways to improve goods, services or business models. Entrepreneurship can be thought of as a mindset rather than a job title.

Disseminating this mindset means empowering employees to implement their ideas by giving them enough leeway and resources. The implementation part — or the ‘hustle’ — is perhaps what separates intrapreneurs from employees with good ideas. It is also the most important part to ensure that innovation efforts are adding real value.

Fast Company defines the difference between Creativity and Innovation as being, “Creativity is the process of generating something new. It is a prerequisite for innovation. Innovation, however, is the practical application of creativity. A good idea is a great thing, but if the idea is not implemented, for whatever reason, we simply have creativity”.

One idea that can be implemented is to allow employees to use a percentage of their work time to pursue their own initiatives. 3M calls this the 15 percent program. When they launched this program in 1948, they did not know that they will be launching an innovation dynamo. Today, 3M is a multinational powerhouse, boasting 22,800 patents, and has been awarded the US government’s highest award for innovation, the National Medal of Technology. Although not all patents come from the 15 % program, it is one of the ways in which they have nurtured an innovative culture.

It is very easy to get stuck in the weeds of running daily operations, and such programs present people with the space to break out of tunnel vision, and think beyond their cubicles, and daily tasks, to see how things can be improved.

Build an Easy Process for Presenting Innovations

Amazon prides itself on being customer-obsessed. Their ethos is to start with the customer and work backwards, which is why at the heart of their innovation engine is their ‘Work Backwards’ process that starts with the following:

A one-page press release that announces the new idea, its name, target audience, and value, highlighting the type of customer problems it is going to solve. A six-page FAQ list that lays out details about the solution, and the anticipated issues customers might encounter or be curious about. Customer experience in the form of mockups or rough prototypes to show how customers will access and work with the new solution.

This process helps employees gain clarity about their proposed idea. It also reinforces the intrapreneurial mindset as they are expected to advocate for their ideas, selling them internally by presenting them with the same level of energy and enthusiasm as though it were launch day.

Give autonomy, with accountability

To allow creativity and innovation to flourish, as a leader you must ensure that every employee has the needed level of autonomy over how they complete their tasks, and solve any problems that arise. According to social science writer Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us’, autonomy is one of the major drivers of workplace motivation. Daniel asserts that the secret to high performance and job satisfaction is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, learn and create new things. Rethinking traditional ideas of control and micro-management such as regular office hours, dress codes, numerical targets — organizations can increase staff engagement, build trust, and create a culture of innovation. Giving staff autonomy means giving them the space to try, fail, learn, succeed and repeat.

However, it is important to note that giving autonomy does not mean removing accountability as the right expectations need to be set. You would not want chaos to reign supreme, which is why it is important to ensure that everybody is clearly aligned with the organization’s strategic priorities.

Allow Experiments to Fail

Most attempts to innovate fail. Punishing failure in the workplace does not reduce the rate of failure, rather it ends up killing innovation itself. As a leader, it is important for you to build a safe work environment where employees can talk openly about failures, and focus on learnings that come out of these.

In fact, why not take a step further and celebrate failures? P & G, for example, has “heroic failure awards,” and Google employees are publicly applauded by their co-workers and supervisors for embracing failure, and rewarded with time off to think about their next project.

Failing often does not mean it should come at the expense of critical thinking and delivering good quality work. Its main realm is to be iterative, tweaking as we learn from mistakes, and redoing if necessary in order to move the company forward.

Remember that your most valuable resources are the people within your organization — their motivation, imagination, and faith in a better future. So harness their energy to drive your innovation engine.

About the author: Amina Islam is the Innovative Learning Lead for Xcelerator , where she works with the product team to develop new programs. She received her Ph.D. from Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in 2017. Amina is always excited about new ideas and explores them in writing on her Linkedin profile and ahscribbles.com.