Innovation Carnival at my office - my post

I posted the following for the innovation carnival at my company. The post was to answer all or one or two of the three questions. Towards the end are a the interesting comments I received.


1) How might we make our associates get interested in innovation?

• Getting one interested in innovation is next to impossible. Even when associates get innovative ideas, they often lack the time, energy and drive to report their ideas and see to it that they are validated, enhanced and implemented. Works shops may be conducted by innovation group and they can brain storm with groups of associates with a specific problem statement. While workshops with definitions of innovation and interesting games have a definite feel good factor about them, most people take home almost nothing. On the other hand, when brain storming sessions are conducted, a lot of ideas float. Some may be trivial, some might seem impossible and some might be just plain irrelevant. But an hour of thinking and discussion is bound to yield at least one good idea. So, the focus could be on getting people to innovate without actually getting them to think they are innovating!

2) How might we make our associates think innovation is easy?

• Pass :)

3) What is the one thing our associates will change, (if they were CEO) to promote innovation?

• If I were the CEO, I would get the innovation group to create problem statements and create brain – storm – session – groups (this is hectic. We need to get everybody to participate! And not burden a bunch of associates with too many sessions – for one thing, they have project deliverables and might quickly lose interest). Now, that’s an idea. Could be bad, but idea it is!

My two cents


Problem statement: Traffic situation in Bangalore and excess time spent on commuting to and from office


Solution: Instead of having everyone come to one place of work, people commuting from specific parts of the city may assemble in one building near to their place of stay. This is not as insecure as working from home and can yet fight traffic situation.


Now, there will be issues like

1. There will not be a single ODC specific to each of the clients
2. Access control – which associate enters which office
3. Maintenance cost of several small offices.

The pros to this approach would be

1. Saving fuel and time
2. Less pollution
3. Maybe in some indirect way, water will be saved! :)

Comments

First Comment: (Durbha Vishwanath)

Here are a couple of points I'd like to make.

1. Hire more people who are natural creators rather than consumers. What I mean here is that hire people who have a natural inclination to create their own projects to solve some specific problems. One way you can identify them is to ask people in interviews about any projects they have created by themselves apart from their regular delivery work.
2. Company should create incentives for people willing to spend those few extra hours working on their own projects. Incentives can be in the form of infrastructure support and time. One good model is how Google promotes innovation. They give 20% to all engineers to work on things they like. And they setup a fantastic infrastructure to allow engineers to host and run their projects. Besides that, they give engineers a couple of big platforms in an year to launch their projects in front of a large audience and get feedback. I'm sure all this is also tied into their process of calculating how much value each individual is bringing to the company.
   

Second Comment: (D. J. Sri Harsha)

Nice one :)

All of us innovate in some way, but the innovations in this corporate world are measured on ROI for which we require some sort of direction. So as you said brain storming sessions are the way to go.

Third Comment: (Thomas Ken)

Hi Anasuya,

Interesting post. Couple of things that I would like mention. The first question of yours "How might WE MAKE our associates GET INTERESTED in innovation?". I feel that innovation is something that needs to come from within. You can't just get a bunch of people and ask them to innovate. If that was the case we would have had so many Steve Jobs and Bill Gates around. Three main ingredients an innovator would have would be patience, belief in oneself and passion. An example of sheer patience would be Thomas Edison, who took 999 tries to light a bulb. So how can the others help/contribute? Well, we can encourage people who innovate to move ahead with their idea and pour in our suggessions or provide a helping hand.

For a Corporate to be a true innovator, I feel first of all some policies/rules need to be bend, in other words there should be freedom. Freedom to do anything with technology (incase of IT), there shouldn't be strict policies that govern them. This would be difficult in a customer centric organization, because of security constrains. You need to run around for approvals for anything and everything and at the end of the day all you would have got is a list of approvals ;-)

Also, innovation is something that needs to be part of the companies DNA. For example, Google employees are encouraged to spend 80% of their time on core projects, and roughly 20% on “innovation” activities. I believe this 20% falls within the office timings :-).

Thanks

Akshay's comment: My take on this point is that people who have the competence and will to innovate will innovate even without external motivation. If a conducive atmosphere is available, it definitely provides more incentive. However, people with no interest in contributing to innovation cannot be coerced into doing so no matter what.

Pankil, PLEASE post a comment

Vibu, need I say :P