Do you have what it takes to innovate?
Collaborating with the crowd is more important than ever. HP Fellow Ed Kettler outlines five traits essential to creating change that generates business value.
Innovation is essential to surviving rapid change. It breeds new ideas, processes and methods focused on generating value and gaining a competitive edge. And unleashing it may be less complicated than you realize.
For example, consider this common problem. An insurance company, with a workforce that exceeds 36,000, wanted to tap into the knowledge of employees, customers and partners. After deploying a Web-based innovation management platform, the company was able to quickly sift “high impact ideas.” The ideas generated account for $3.5 billion in potential revenue.
Someone in the crowd knows the answer
“Innovation is a community sport,” advises HP Fellow Ed Kettler. “The answer to a specific problem is almost always known by someone in the organization.” However, “the person closest to the problem usually has an answer but may not have the voice to catch the ear of leadership.”
In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki dispels the belief that knowledge rests exclusively in the hands of skilled experts. Chasing the expert, he argues, is a costly mistake. “We should stop hunting and ask the crowd instead,” Surowiecki writes. “Chances are, it knows.”
How can leaders cultivate a culture of innovation to gain a competitive advantage in an environment of accelerating disruptive change? Kettler shares five features of successful innovation strategies:
- Know what innovation is. Innovation equals value. An idea that fails to solve a business problem or deliver value will not be perceived as innovation.
- Understand the ecosystem. Leaders must possess a thorough understanding of an organization’s operations, industry and competitive environment.
- Engage employees. Develop talent and inspire enthusiasm by continuously expressing the necessity for innovation. Reinforce the process with recognition.
- Cultivate innovator language. Develop the necessary communication skills to effectively express the business value of specific ideas at every level.
- Foster divergent thinking. Encourage intersections with non-adjacent worlds such as Olympic competition, film and astronomy to drive strategic imagination.
Hands-on participation stimulates innovation
Ed Kettler, an HP Fellow, is the Chief Technologist for Sustainability for HP Enterprise Services’ US Public Sector organization. He is responsible for strategy development and delivery for energy and sustainability management solutions. Continue the conversation with Ed on The Next Big Thing Blog.
Sustain your innovative culture by continuously circulating stories and shared experiences of success, advises the consulting firm InnovationPoint, LLC. Instead of classroom study, allow employees to directly participate in the process by exploring solutions to real-world challenges. This stimulates experiential learning, which provides innovation narratives to be captured and implemented.
Such out-of-the box thinking is going to be a necessary transition for enterprises to manage information going forward. “The demand for speed, efficient analytics and network capacity will be vast. Some experts project within two decades we will need upward of a thousand Internets worth of capacity to cope,” Kettler says. “Only the innovative will survive such data deluge.”
Learn how HP is helping clients flip the ratio from operations to innovation as an Instant-On Enterprise.
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