10 Key Ingredients to Corporate Innovation

Yesterday in the midst of scanning a variety of articles on innovation, as I do on a regular basis, I came across this post on Now Europe listing the top eight, actually ten, attributes companies that successfully innovate share. I've summarized them below, but you can read the full article here.

1. Top management buy-in

If senior management do not buy into your innovation process, no one else will.

2. Budget

One of the most effective ways for senior management to buy into innovation is for them to allot budget for the initiative.

3. Communication

Once your initiative is ready to launch, it is critical that people know about it, what it is meant to accomplish and how they should participate.

4. Rewards

Complementing communications is a rewards scheme for participating in your innovation activities. Rewards should be relatively small and recognise participation rather than good ideas.

5. Dedicated Innovation People

Assign an individual, individuals or a team the mandate of managing your organisation's innovation strategy.

6. Collaborative Innovation Tools

Enterprises need collaborative tools. Each individual has her own tools and methods for creative thinking, but rather than demand the use of a particular personal creativity tool for all employees, firms should give employees the freedom to use the tools that work best for each person.

7. Effective Evaluation System

It is important that your evaluation process is not a purely critical one. It is easy for evaluators to find all the weak points in an idea. But this can result in very promising ideas being rejected. So, evaluators should be asked not merely to criticise ideas, but also to provide suggestions on overcoming the problems they have identified.

8. Willingness to Invest in Innovative Ideas

Surprisingly, many organisations invest in creativity and innovation tools, but then fail to implement the most innovative ideas they generate.This is usually the result of excessive risk aversion, large approval committees, too much internal bureaucracy or a combination of these. Whatever is the cause, the result is a creativity programme which generates ideas rather than an innovation strategy in which creative ideas are implemented.

9. Enthusiasm

.Enthusiasm encourages participation in the initiative, makes people feel good about their participation and tends to encourage more radical thinking. If employees know that their crazy ideas are enthusiastically welcomed, they are encouraged to push their creative thinking ever further.

10. Diversity

..., if your firm employees a wide range of people with different educational backgrounds, different kinds of experience and of different cultures, your firm will have the advantage of breadth of knowledge, experience and thinking. That results in a wider range of ideas and a higher level of creativity.

What I like about this list is that it covers a wide spectrum of necessary "ingredients" that will result in effective launches of great innovative products... over and over again. Too often companies manage to develop and launch an innovative new product in spite of their corporate culture rather than because of it.

Large companies often embark on an innovation campaign, throw a few creative people at it and railroad an idea through and, if they're lucky, the product is a success. But too often it IS luck that plays the largest role in the achievement, which makes the whole process... unrepeatable.

To create a true innovation machine a company needs to look closely at its culture and determine what changes need to be made to re-energize the business and direct it toward innovation. This isn't an overnight process, which may be why the most innovative companies tend to be those that are smaller, newer and have not yet developed the stagnant corporate culture that typifies large businesses on this side of the Atlantic... or perhaps everywhere.

Not to say that it isn't possible for a large company to become innovative. Many of the steps listed above are easy to implement and should be applied across the corporation. Others require wholesale change which may be a bit difficult in an established company. (Who wants to fire half the workforce and hire on new to meet point number 10, Diversity?)

Other changes may need to be made on a smaller scale in a separate operating unit, dedicated to innovation. Many organizations have found success this way. This strategy too will fail though if only lip service is paid to innovation in the larger corporation.

Every company needs to determine the best way to create an innovation strategy that works best with their particular challenges and within or at least compatible with their own corporate culture. We've helped clients from a variety of different segments to reach these goals by keeping this fact, and the 10 ingredients for innovation success, in mind.