Community Forum – How do you encourage company wide innovation?

Resource Type
Survey (Community Forum)
Publish Date
02/05/2021
Author
Innovation Research Interchange
Topics
Ideation, Talent Management, Employee Innovation, Open Innovation and Contests
Associated Event
Publication
This week’s Community Forum Survey Results
 
A: How do you encourage company wide innovation?
 
Everyone in our organization has a role in innovation and we have an internal website where all employees can share their ideas.  This results in prizes, recognition, etc.  Our challenge is, how do you encourage people outside of R&D to participate?
  • We use an informal recognition system that can include highlighting on the company intranet site, a presentation to executive leadership on their work, or spot rewards.
  • We have internal open innovation communities which socialize through Yammer channels.  Anyone with interest can join – some are general around innovation, others are specific to communities with similar interests.  We encourage employees from across the organization to participate in ideation sessions and/or provide feedback on concepts – small incentives are offered to encourage participation.
  • Change the HR metrics for performance review and compensation to require annual participation of 10% of time in innovation projects that have goals to improve organizational capability measured by productivity, cost, efficiency or customer satisfaction – teach a process for innovation that allocates planning, experimentation and testing. Publish the projects and participants.
  • Highlight innovation across the value chain in weekly communications.
  • 1) Directly via their manager encouraging new and innovative solutions as part of their job, 2) broadly via corporate activities that are innovation focused that the company ALWAYS follows up with a reply, and 3) via an executive commitment and message.
  • Innovation is part of our corporate culture; we have created an organizational structure that encourages innovation outside of R&D with prime examples being our customer experience lab which is designed for co-innovation with customer organizations and our global co-innovation lab platform that encourages collaboration with external partners to develop solutions to sustainable mobility challenges on a topic of common interest.  Activities focused on co-innovation are widely publicized both internally and externally. The co-innovation focus is very dependent on developing partnerships with external organizations.
  • Bring in external speakers, as well as highlight internal innovation success stories.
  • Continuous improvement is expected in all functions and innovative new ways to work are part of that continuous improvement.
  • Share what categories we want ideas around and ask them and then keep them updated when they put in an idea. Get in front of them at their regular team meetings, share what’s been going on, and ask.  When you run focused innovation events – focus on staff outside R&D.
  • Innovation is key to be successful in the market and our only way to beat competitors and stay number one. I always bring up Nokia/Apple example for the market of mobile phones to show the relevance of innovation in industry.
  • Internal ideation platform
  • Innovation Challenges, Innovation “newsletters”, Innovation champion network
  • We do not get good participation outside of R&D frequently. We run a challenge session perhaps once/yr or when we have innovation summits which seems to be efficient in getting input.
  • We don’t have a good methodology around this.  The closest would be our efforts for to always look for opportunities for Continuous Improvement.
  • Little input from people outside of R&D.  There is recognition, but monetary incentives are limited to filed patent applications on a country by country basis. There is no other current mechanism.
 
Here are some IRI resources that may be of interest to you:
  • March 9th Innovation Leader Coffee House – the group will be discussing this topic! Everyone is welcome to participate.
  • Eureka! Lessons Learned from an Evaluation of the Idea Contest – RTM article
  • Unlock Creativity with “Active” Idea Management – RTM article
  • The May 2021 issue of RTM will have an interview with Scott Anthony, author of Eat, Sleep, Innovate, which discusses this topic. The C-Scape profile is of Michael Reynolds, VP of Innovation at Stanley Black & Decker, and he discusses their Innovate Everywhere program.
 
 


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