Bringing Innovation to your Business

1. Identify what you want out of innovation. Different organizations will have different needs and different ways that innovation can meet those needs. Your organizations need may be to be closer to your customer to allow you to be more responsive to their needs. Other organizations may need to be better at creating new products and services. Knowing what your organization’s need is, and how being more innovative could help is an essential first step.
2. The next step is to understand what your organization knows – what are its skills and competencies? The ability to innovate is based on knowledge, some of the knowledge may reside in-house and you may need to engage consultants or vendors to supply the rest. The classic example of in-house skills and competencies is the R&D department. It is their job to design innovative products and services. A great external source of skills and competencies are universities and colleges. Many industry leaders are taking advantage of the innovative abilities of these institutions by forming collaborative associations with them. RIM’s collaboration with the University of Waterloo is one example.
3. Now that you’ve established what you need and where you’re going to get it, you concentrate on encouraging innovative ideas. When you’re working with an R&D organization, this is relatively straight forward – being innovative is what they’re paid to do, it’s simply a matter of pointing them in the right direction. Organizations that don’t have R&D groups must be more resourceful. They have to change the culture so that employees identified as the owners of the skills and competencies being sought, see communicating new ideas and suggestions as part of their jobs. Creating a culture where this is encouraged and then facilitating sharing new ideas with the right communications tools will foster creative thinking and enable the implementation of the best ideas.
4. Make it easy for different groups across your organization to share their ideas. Thinking in silos may produce innovation that may help one group at the expense of another. Sharing ideas across groups will help avoid this and foster ideas that help the organization as a whole. Putting the proper communication tools and processes in place will support this.
5. The last step is the implementation of the innovative ideas the previous 4 steps have produced. This is a key step and will require executive support, particularly where the idea requires several different groups within the organization to co-operate. It’ up to the executive to supply the budget and resources to make sure implementation happens.

What makes innovation especially important today is the economic environment of the times. As the recession deepens and demand for products and services lessens it’s important to make sure our organizations are agile at responding to changing demands and that we’re better than our competition at making the right products and services at the right price.

By now I’m sure you’re wondering where in the world project management fits into all of this? But surely some of the ideas Chris has shared will sound familiar to you. For example, identifying the knowledge resident in the organization could refer to the knowledge base you’ve built during the course of managing projects (that knowledge base is known in PMP^® circles as Lessons Learned. While this information is project oriented as opposed to operations, if one of the objectives is to reduce costs it’s likely that knowledge captured in your Lessons Learned archives will be of use.

The last step in this process is the implementation of innovative ideas. In some cases implementation may be a relatively trivial exercise that wouldn’t require the organization of a project, but in others, particularly where new products or services are created, a project will be required and it will be up to a project management practitioner to manage that project. This project will be no different than any of the others you’re asked to manage in that executive support in the form of sponsorship is vital to the success of the project. They need to fund and prioritize your project and then champion it. Then it’s up to you to make sure the project delivers all the innovation the executive had when they handed this project over to you. Remember that you have an important stakeholder in this project: the innovative idea’s author. You should always ensure the project meets your sponsor’s expectations but will want to communicate with the idea’s author to ensure nothing get’s missed. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll get all the information you’ll need about the idea up front so you need to keep the channels of communication clear so you can come back and ask follow up questions that will help define requirements for your project.