How to get higher returns from your innovation training?
“Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country,” said John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Speech (Jan 20th, 1961). As HR managers, tell your innovation trainers and consultants “Ask not how much our company can pay you, ask how much profit you can generate for our company”.
Innovation is not just another training module in your staff’s learning curriculum. It can be a life-changing experience for the individuals who innovate as well as achieve a record-breaking triumph for the team who create the winning edge for the corporation. Innovation training is never about how much cost, it is about how much savings or profits your staff can generate out of the training.
Many HR managers send their staff to creativity and innovation workshops. They come back with a couple of ideas for staff suggestion schemes and end up with the company saving pennies on toilet paper and stationeries. Such unstructured innovation is a mere waste of money.
Some innovation practitioners will argue that Innovation should be unstructured and random in order to be creative, but this is not true. Corporations cannot rely on a “flash of lightning” to create and innovate. Structured Innovation methodology produces continuous and well-orchestrated “flashes of lightning” that are aligned with the business goals.
To get return on investment in innovation training, the organisation must follow a structured innovation approach. Beginning with the corporate vision, mission and objectives, each innovation project can be aligned to the business goals, approved, funded, systematically tracked and implemented. Innovation training can bring in ROI of a hundred fold if the trained staff can implement the skills learned systematically and successfully.
Structured innovation approach involves:
1. Instilling an innovation mindset into every staff and management,
2. Training and equipping the staff with innovation skill sets
3. Adopting an innovation management framework
4. Creating a couple of Corporate innovation success stories
Innovation mindset
I define MINDSET as whatever you SET your MIND to be. Having met numerous Innovation training and consulting engagements, employees who are sceptical of their management’s acceptance of innovation. They cited examples on how their bosses scoff at their ideas with comments like “It’s too expensive”, “We tried that before”, “It won’t work” and “Why can’t you do it the normal way”. Yet at the same time, within the same organisation, the management talked about their support for innovation. They commented that their staff are not creative enough.
Instead of saying:
“It’s too expensive”, management can adopt a can-do attitude by asking “How can we do this within the budget?”
“It won’t work, we tried that before”, management can rephrase their comment to “How can we do it differently?” or “Let’s look for an innovative way to get it to work”.
It’s amazing how such simple rephrasing of words can turn the organisation into a positive innovative workplace where ideas spawn freely without boundaries.
Great tools that I personally recommend include:
There are hundreds of tools and techniques available to help your staff innovate. Many such tools and techniques are taught in creativity and innovation workshops. Evaluate your training providers through the relevance of the innovative tools and techniques taught. Avoid workshops that focus on logic puzzles and fun toys. While these toys and puzzles are good for kids and academics, they may not be practical in a corporate environment. Look for workshops with practical and related industry real life examples.
Great tools that I personally recommend include:
• SCAMPER (stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put-to-other-use, Eliminate and Reverse). This tool can help your team generate a thousand ideas within 28 minutes. Use this to during the idea generation phase for your innovation lifecycle.
• Matrix brainstorming. This is a good technique to use when you need to brainstorm ideas which fit into 2 or 3 sets of parameters (or constraints). For example, how to create a new product using materials (1st set of parameters) with the following features (2nd set of parameters)? Instead of selling steel bars and steel plates as raw materials, one of my clients generated an idea to create and sell liquid steel (matching of 2 sets of parameters). If they can do that successfully, steel can then be shipped to their customers in containers, pumped into moulds like plastics and left to solidify.
• A Day in the future
Imagine yourself as your customer a day in the future, say 10 years. What problems will he face? What gadgets is he likely to need?
Imagine yourself as a product being manufactured. What problems would you face? How can you be better packaged?
Imagine if technology A can merge with technology B, how could we …
Imagine if we could eliminate travel, what would the world be like?
Use this imagine technique for your next corporate visioning management meeting. You will be surprised with the results of possible exciting scenarios and innovative ideas created. One of these ideas could steer your organisation towards new markets.
Innovation Management Framework
Having lots of tools that generate lots of ideas are useless unless these ideas are systematically submitted, assessed, reviewed, approved, funded, implemented, tracked, reviewed and perhaps rewarded. In other words, we need to develop an innovation management framework to manage innovation throughout its lifecycle.
I have developed a 7 ‘I’s of innovation management framework, namely:
1. Inspiration or inefficiency – Sources of innovation
Where do you get your great ideas from? Great men get their ideas from dreams or inspirations. Most of the others look for ideas in overcoming problems (inefficiency). Formulate your innovation mission statements, aligned with the corporate vision, mission and business objectives.
Innovation mission statements are best defined at the CEO and directors level, e.g. the sales director can be inspired to grow his sales at double the industry’s growth rate. The manufacturing director can inspire to achieve a breakthrough in his production line efficiency or achieve world class cost structure.
2. Ideas generation
Using the innovation skills sets, tools and techniques, the innovation teams can generate thousands of ideas supporting each of the innovation mission statements. At this juncture, the teams strive for creativity, uniqueness and breakthrough ideas. Volume is the name of the game here and thousands of ideas is what we like to achieve.
3. Ideas sorting
Implementing thousands of ideas is not practical. In this phase, the team focuses on selecting the best ideas out of the thousands that they have generated. Some ideas may merge while others may spawn off many more. At the end of this phase, the teams should select a handful of the greatest, most creative, most profitable ideas for implementation.
4. Incubation
This is the phase where the selected ideas are brainstormed, expanded and probed in depth for its practicality. Features may be added, cost estimated and timeline set. At the end of this phase is a presentation to the management for a go/no-go decision. Once management approval is given, resources (especially money) and expertise can be allocated.
5. Implementation
Project management commences. Each approved project is tracked and reviewed monthly. With constant management coaching, the teams aspire to complete the innovation project at the quickest possible time with maximum business savings (or profit) for the company.
6. Illumination
As the projects trod along, the management watches for signs of illumination. These are triggers which signifies the success (or failure) of the projects, such as increase in profit, savings, customer satisfaction, etc. Once illuminated, management would pour in massive resources to roll the project into its full potential. This is about market dominance or industry conquest. It is about changing life and reinventing the future.
7. Iteration
Iteration is about receiving constant feedback, constant improvements and fine-tuning of project ideas throughout its lifecycle. Technology changes and competitive initiatives may negate the merits of or even obsolete your innovation projects. Constant iterations are needed to ensure that the teams are heading towards the right direction.
John Seah
Managing director, Everest Innovation
website: www.everesti.com
Case study
Repeat customer is our biggest problem!
As part of the innovation situation analysis, I spoke to a director from the Singapore Prison Services and asked him about the organisation’s greatest problem he would like our innovation team to fix. He jokingly said that “Repeat Customers” was his biggest headache. He was referring to recidivism – where inmates return to crime after their release from prison.
The Challenge:
All innovation projects should begin with the client’s business mission statement or their toughest business problems. For our client, Singapore Prison Services, their mission is to be Captains of Lives, to rehab, to renew and to restart. With the officers’ dedication, many inmates were released from prison in high spirit and greatly motivated to change a new live. However, society did not accept nor forgive them. As a result, the ex-inmates went hungry and returned to crimes.
How did our consultants value-add?
The prison officers brought this problem for brainstorming in our workshops. Here is a sample of some of our thought processes and brainstorming techniques used:
Problem statement 1:
Our inmates could not get jobs after they were released from prison.
Paraphrase:
How could our inmates get jobs before they were released?
Problem Statement 2
Our inmates could not get jobs because their tattoos would frighten off their clients.
Paraphrase:
How could our inmates get jobs where clients would not see their tattoos?
The participants then proceeded to generate some 3,500 ideas based on the paraphrased problem statements.
The innovative achievement:
At the end of the ideas sorting phase, one idea stood up as the answer to the above problem statements: setting up a call centre behind bars – this was the first in the world.
Through this idea, the inmates could be working before they were released while they were still in the prison. It helped the inmates better integrate with the society in preparation for them to restart their live anew. They were also trained on customer service skills, handling difficult customer skills and problem solving skills.
