The keys to developing collaborative innovation in your company
Collaborative innovation is a collective process that involves implementing best practices and avoiding pitfalls. A resilient company knows how to innovate and how to adapt to changing contexts. The place of innovation in the company is an organizational and cultural issue that must take center stage. When innovation becomes every employee’s business, we call this collaborative, or participatory, innovation.
If it is to survive, the company must be able to draw on this collaborative innovation to remain in constant motion, reinforcing its ability to face new challenges and strengthening the employee experience it offers.
When innovation culture becomes central to the company
Too often, when we think of innovation, we think of disruptive innovation. The real innovations within companies are above all incremental. Every company benefits daily from the ideas proposed by its employees to improve its products and processes.
In this sense, the kaizen approach, derived from the Toyota production system, has played a key role in the continuous improvement of business performance by encouraging every employee to generate and implement ideas. The basic notion behind the kaizen approach is that a continuous flow of practical improvements translates into substantial productivity and quality gains for the company over time.
Although this approach has its roots in the industrial world, kaizen has also proved effective in other sectors such as auditing, advertising, and banking, where employees’ innovation contributions have often been invaluable.
Collaborative innovation or how to develop the commitment of each employee
One of the major obstacles to innovation within companies is often the organizational difficulty of abandoning established practices, processes, or standards (especially when these are institutionalized in validated strategic documents). Another obstacle often cited by employees is the lack of transparency regarding internal changes, new developments, or innovations, which may then be perceived as being imposed.
One of the keys to avoiding this second obstacle is the commitment of every employee to the company’s innovation initiatives, regardless of their place in the organization chart.
Employees rarely get a sense of how their ideas are evaluated and retained. The feedback and escalation process are not always transparent for an employee far removed from managerial or strategic functions. Yet “front-line” employees are often best placed to detect changing market conditions and future business opportunities. However, they are often the least heard (as they are at the lowest level of the organization). In short, it is difficult to get employees on board when decision-making is hierarchical and when processes are not transparent.
How can you deploy collaborative innovation in your company?
The problem of scaling up innovation in a company
There are many different ways of stimulating and developing innovation within a group, entity, or company. We will not go into them here.
Nevertheless, the principles of POC (Proof of Concept) or small-scale beta-testing have been gaining ground in companies for years. They often enable agility and rapid testing of an idea or concept. But what happens when it is time to scale up and deploy a successfully tested innovation more widely?
Quite often, the innovation comes up against a number of internal obstacles that prevent this scale-up.
Innovations do not spread easily in siloed companies. Ideas are often “sticky” only for their department or their creator, and persuading other people to adopt them may be difficult (as they will want to emphasize their own specificities). To complicate matters, organizations often suffer from “not-invented-here syndrome”. As a result, potentially clever ideas are often overlooked or ignored because they are perceived as being unsuited to the context of a particular assignment, project, or department.
Start with shared, collective needs
A key condition for successfully scaling up an innovation within a company is to ensure that the solution provided by the innovation addresses a problem shared by several target users. Meeting this condition requires the contributor of the idea to verify the value of changing or optimizing a process, approach, or service with his or her peers, and to understand what processes are currently in place. This may require extra effort, but it will ensure that the solution can be adapted to multiple and varied uses.
Reward employees who innovate
“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” could be the idea. Employee commitment cannot be based solely on goodwill or generosity. The company needs to create the conditions internally to foster innovation. We often hear about the example of Google and the time it gives its employees to get involved in projects other than those linked to their job. An interesting example, but one that is often ill-suited to the context and operational reality of most companies.
Bonuses, career advancement, and internal recognition are effective ways of rewarding innovation and those who participate in it. More recently, principles derived from video games (gamification) have also proved to be effective ways of rewarding people who participate in collaborative innovation platforms.
Three keys to achieving successful collaborative innovation in your company
Reinforce awareness-raising initiatives
We have already mentioned this, but for innovation to be everyone’s business, everyone needs to understand the “WHY”:
- the COLLECTIVE WHY: Why do we need to innovate (especially if from our point of view, we cannot see the problems)?
- the INDIVIDUAL WHY: Why should I participate in this innovation? What do I gain from sharing my ideas?
Awareness-raising and communication are prerequisites for collaboration if innovation is to become an integral part of corporate culture. To participate and fully commit to an approach, the people involved must understand the value of this innovation process.
This individual awareness can also be raised through an assessment, an evaluation methodology that enables each person to gain awareness of his or her commitment.
Reward commitment within the company
The idea is to reward, within the company, committed employees who drive collective innovation. They function as genuine accelerators and catalysts for the collective effort.
The processes and purpose of innovation divert employees from their usual tasks, and so although collective innovation can sometimes be stressful for these employees, it must above all “liberate constructive energies”.
Rewarding the process, and those who take part in it, internally within the company, or with management, helps to increase this potential for constructive energy.
Free yourself (in part) from hierarchical constraints
We tend to think that innovation should automatically take place outside the established framework. This is partly true if we are facing constraints imposed by hierarchies or overly rigorous processes.
However, innovating outside the framework can lead to a waste of energy or to difficulties moving a project beyond the POC stage.
Innovation requires latitude, but this flexibility must be tailored to the project, the teams involved, the budgets allocated, and the objectives expected.