The Innovation Mandate
To innovate is a fundamental and universal organizational imperative; for continuous improvement, learning and rapid adaptation; in an external environment that is changing at lightning speed; in an age of ever-increasing uncertainty.
The Innovation Challenge & Opportunity
Innovators – organizations and individuals - face multiple challenges. An idea management system can convert these challenges into opportunities. An indicative list of such challenges and corresponding opportunities follows:
Challenge
|
Opportunity
|
Scarce
Resources:
All
organizations and managers are called upon to continuously do more with less.
This is perhaps particularly true for the public sector, as reflected in the
catchphrase and philosophy, “Minimum Government, Maximum Governance”, of the
Government of India.
|
Our
People:
For most if
not all Government organizations, their most invaluable resource is their
people. However, their potential lies largely untapped, hidden and
under-utilized. An idea management system is an opportunity to develop our
people and empower them to contribute for organizational improvement and
innovation.
|
Islands
of Wisdom:
The structures
and systems we have devised to ensure order and efficiency have also erected
boundaries within and among departments. These boundaries encourage working
within silos, and make it difficult for the organization to harness its innovation
potential adequately. Thus, an idea with organization-wide applicability
remains confined to an island; and an idea which can spawn many other ideas
fails to give birth to them.
|
Organization-wide
Collaboration:
An idea
management system offers to make collaboration and team-work the norm, rather
than the exception. Organization-wide sharing of an idea enables not only
enables its wide adoption and full exploration, generating potentially numerous
other ideas for organizational improvement; but also builds camaraderie and mutual
respect, improving organizational culture and performance.
|
Lack
of Employee Motivation:
A
quintessential problem, this is sometimes more entrenched in Government
departments. This cripples organizational innovation, which demands that
everyone – not just the management – puts on a thinking hat and is able and
willing to go the extra mile in contributing to the organization.
|
Employees
as Innovation Partners:
By asking
employees to be thinkers and innovators, an idea management system enriches
and enlarges their job. It is a tool to enhance employees’ self-worth, bring
about greater job engagement, organizational commitment and superior
performance. Moreover, being intimately familiar with the work they do, employees
have been found to come up with some of the most innovative and impactful ideas.
|
The Need to Manage Innovation
A systematic process is required to convert such challenges into opportunities, as above. Evidence from hundreds of diverse organizations shows that innovation does not happen on its own; innovation has to be managed actively. Further, as innovation researcher Tim Kastelle says, innovation is the process of idea management.
Thus, ideas are the key ingredient in the innovation process, but without a mechanism for managing them, it is difficult to prioritize innovation efforts and to channel innovation activity into the areas it is needed most. An idea management system can be of immense help in this regard.
The benefits of a systematic well-run idea management system would far outrun the ones initially envisaged. The impact it can have on the organization can be nothing short of revolutionary, in an incremental fashion though. It is a tool for organizational transformation which thus marries the incrementalism of Government systems with the high aspirations leadership and citizens have for the end-goals of public service delivery.
What is an Idea Management System?
An idea management system (IMS) is a systematic, formal mechanism for soliciting, generating, developing, evaluating, selecting, implementing, spreading and learning from large numbers of ideas from anyone and everyone in the organization.
How an IMS assists in the Innovation Process
The below table identifies how an IMS can assist at each stage of the innovation process.
Innovation
Phase
|
How
an IMS assists
|
Idea generation – finding,
adapting or creating the ideas
|
An IMS can encourage employees to
put forward ideas. An IMS can help in the process of refining and iterating
those ideas by allowing others to share their perspectives and inputs.
|
Idea selection – picking which
ideas to use
|
By letting others be aware of
suggested approaches, ideas can be tested early through sharing of
experiences, limitations and impacting factors, and possible improvements to
the idea.
|
Idea implementation – putting the
ideas into practice
|
An IMS can assist implementation
if it records lessons learnt, identifies options that have and have not
worked, and codifies what made the implementation successful.
|
Sustaining ideas – keeping the
ideas going
|
An IMS can assist the embedding
of ideas by outlining the need for an idea and providing a reminder of the
problems faced before it came about.
|
Idea diffusion – spreading the
ideas and the insights about them
|
By recording the ideas and the
resulting action other areas facing a similar or parallel issue may be better
able to see potential solutions.
|
(Excerpted from the Public Sector Innovation Toolkit, of the Government of Australia)
How an IMS is Different
An idea management system possesses the following advantages, which traditional systems lack:
- An IMS is open to ideas from everyone in the organization, irrespective of their rank or division
- Transparency and sharing of ideas becomes a force-multiplier
- An IMS can allow even anonymous posting of improvement ideas, thus potentially reducing some of the inhibitions which prevent people to come forward with their ideas
- A well-designed IMS serves as a database of problems, solutions, implementation approaches and lessons learnt; this is a huge asset for the organization which can spur further growth and innovation.
We shall explore success stories, and the implementation roadmap in a later post.
Does your organization have an Idea Management System? What is your experience with an IMS? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thank you.
A shorter version of this article was published earlier: Let Ideas Flow
(this article itself was published originally on LinkedIn)
References:
- Ideas are Free – Alan Robinson, Dean M. Schroeder
- The Idea Driven Organization - Alan Robinson, Dean M. Schroeder
- How to Manage Innovation as a Process
- An Overview of Idea Management Systems
- Why Innovation matters
- http://innovation.govspace.gov.au/
- http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/innovations/idealab
- http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/innovations/IdeaFactory/
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