‘Gain-Storming’ Social Innovation Management

By nurturing a creative community with the right tools, people start to feel safe putting forward their improvement ideas; ideas that they might not put forward in a team meeting of their peers or leaders for fear of being ridiculed or ignored.

I think most people feel that if their idea isn’t going to deliver a million dollar ROI, the business is not interested in hearing about it…bigger fish to fry kind of mentality. Continuous Improvement is about small, incremental improvements that lead to overall large scale business improvement. It’s those little ideas that make it better for everyone in the long-term.

One key measure of success for innovation platforms is when an organisation decides to align it to their customer brand strategy and push it out to their external customers too.

This is testimony to the commitment they make to their internal and external customers about creating a culture where innovation and creativity are welcomed, and where creative effort is recognised and rewarded. And customers and employees know the business is interested in hearing their voice, AND that the business has geared itself to manage their ideas.

One of the nicest ideas I have seen come out of a large organisation, was from a branch consultant tucked away in a branch in Tasmania (where it gets freezing cold in winter). Her idea was to include in their corporate wardrobe, long-sleeved pullovers for women.

That is clear evidence of an employee who feels safe putting their idea forward and who knows that it will find its way to the right person to be equitably assessed and prioritised.

She knows that if anything happens with her idea, if anyone comments (and they did) or if anyone supports her view, she’ll be kept informed.

On this occasion, the business did not need to deploy any complex implementation strategies to bring it to life. The idea is referred back to the initiator that proposes the steps for them to take to bring the opportunity to life.

Next round: Reward & Recognition…maintaining the momentum.

Sounds easy…set up a site to capture Voice Of the Business (VOB) and/or Voice Of the Customer (VOC) then watch the ideas roll in. What then?

OK, you’re a little more sophisticated than that and you have enabled a robust back-end process that manages the output to minimise impact to the business of managing the ideas and initiator expectations, but again I ask you…what then?

Is there a ‘what then’?

How many ‘what then’s’ are there?

Stay tuned…i’ll come back later and share our experiences with you.

I’m amazed at how little importance large companies with big budgets place on maximising the web as a tool for network-wide collaboration.

For the idea management systems we’ve developed to date, I’m finding it hard to get large companies to let go of email alerts and get a simple reader/feeder installed so that anyone in the creative community can subscribe to a particular idea initiator, a category, an idea keyword, phrases, tags etc.

I think collaboration can be a daunting proposal for large organisations. Without the right tools, maintaining the momentum from a burst of promotional activity and communications might be thought to be too hard to manage.

We’ve seen the reach for idea system increase VERY quickly; employees and customer want their voice heard and meaningful conversations going on between people, who previously might have no reason to engage each other, are increasing rapidly. This is where the power of true collaboration to business benefit starts, but it will continue to be bottlenecked by the reliance on email.

For example: If someone comments or promotes someone elses’ idea, except by initiating thousands of email triggers through the system, I don’t see the status of an idea I boosted or commented unless I deliberately go in there and hunt for it. In this business context, email is a collboration killer.

Smaller/emerging companies with smaller budgets, are able to think bigger and embrace collaboration of employees and customers as a fundamental tool for growth. I have adopted a business philosophy (for most situations I find myself in):

Think Smaller to Grow Bigger.

Creativity and people’s ideas are so precious…and personal. The way we think and process/react to information really identifies us socially, so when you ask someone to give you their ideas on how things can be improved, you’re asking them to share with you how their brain responded to a particular input…you’re effectively asking them to bare their soul.

There is nothing more disheartening or insulting to ones creativity than putting your views on the table, and never hearing anything about it again. Early DellIdeaStorm, (Dell’s idea capture system built by Salesforce) copped an absolute caning from idea initiators because they weren’t responding effectively to their creative community.

Put plenty of energy and thinking into how you can make it easy for the business to manage not only the creative output, but the way initiators are kept updated and satisfied, so that they keep coming back with ideas.

Identify ‘hubs’ in the community and promote and reward them for thier involvement because they join your Community Manager as evangelists, promoting the system and encouraging others to join in. Nodes or hubs are those who are actively involved with and respected by the community and who can influence the crowd.

Your ‘hubs’ will be key to the success of your innovation management framework, keeping the momentum going particularly during ‘dry spells’ where there may not be lots of ideas being implemented due to various business reasons. They will nurture the crowd and keep them interested and involved.

Cheers: Eric Imbs

Pulling a crowd.

So many businesses out there that could be…should be tapping into the creative potential not only of the people who work the processes, systems procedures and talk to customers, but also the people at the receiving end of all that stuff…the customer. We know where to look if we need a plumber, or a vet, but where do businesses go when they want to differentiate themselves through innovation and creativity of approach, while building and leveraging from the creative community they create?

We hope this blog will give you enough information for you to more precisly identify potential suppliers when you are ready to take this exciting journey for your business and customers.

Customers and staff are BEST placed to provide ideas on how to improve the business…small scale improvement and eureka moments, they all need to be captured and channelled in the right direction. No use catching it all if it isn’t going to the right person or group who is/are empowered to assess and prioritise and bring it to life if applicable.

But beware…the technology is NOT the answer on its own. The capture of ideas and creativity represents only the first phase of any continuous improvement cycle. If you don’t have the capability and support to sit behind the system…you’ll be buying a white elephant because once you switch that baby on…don’t dare pull it out from under the users’ feet or you’ll have a mutiny on your hands. Get it right, and watch your employee engagement and customer loyalty scores improve.

Getting it right will drive a creative culture that will make people more attuned to spotting opportunities for improvement, and then sharing those with you to take action.

Front line employees are early adopters of this technology…middle management isn’t. Why? Well as a middle manager, if you have a great idea, you know where to go and who to talk to bring it to life, so you don’t fully appreciate the need for a dedicated channel to harness and harvest ideas.

Front line and customers don’t know where to go or who to talk to about their ideas, so they rely on this technology to channel their ideas by need and relevance to the right spot. Middle management however, find it hard to put themselves into the customers or front line staff shoes, so getting their buy-in to implement an idea capture and management system is always a key challenge.

Delloitte have a capture system called ‘Innovation Zone’, which places the onus of brining an idea to life with the initiator. In a large organisation, this is not at all practical and in fact limits the involvement in Continuous Improvement for the bulk of its population.

Having tested and incubated large scale, cross-functional ideas capture and management systems and identified what works and what doesn’t; we can say there are three foundational rules that are non-negotiable.

1. Identify for whom the system exists, and use those groups as your simplicity reference point. If the lowest common denominator can’t submit an idea or process/manage someone else’s idea without instructions…business adoption will be compromised.

This could mean that in order to deliver simplicity to those groups, some back-end functionality or processes are a little more complex.

2. One of the valuable lessons I have learnt recently is to ensure you have someone who manages administration of the system, working as the liaison between the developer and the business. This requires a liaison person who is competent in the technologies used so that they can manage AT LEAST 70% of changes and general maintenance without having to engage the developer.

While some administrator functions of say, .net, look quite simple to the observer; don’t let anyone who is not truly competent fool around in the back end. It WILL lead to disaster as they make changes without knowing the knock-on effects.

3. Have a Community Manager or Sponsor; (this person probably should also be your administrator). This person will be energetic, passionate about creativity and will be your innovation evangelist, promoting not only use of the system, but a culture of creativity throughout your business communities.

Eric Imbs