“Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure.”

Einstein’s observations are interesting in the way in which they combine the need for both the soft and hard dimensions of innovation, the need for:

• creative and engaged individuals (soft), and
• the form and structure needed for translation of innovation into business value (hard)

This insightful quote resonates with our own experience, capturing the tensions at the heart of innovation i.e. the need to encourage expansive individual thinking, and the need to quickly nail down ideas and translate them into business impact.
Innovation and the translation of this into business value has never been more critical:

• the pressure for constant innovation and reinvention
• the need to refresh and renew the portfolio of offerings, and
• the imperative to increase performance and efficiencies. 

Simultaneously the morale, engagement and autonomy of the workforce in many sectors is at an all time low as many live with the daily fear of restructuring and redundancy, and the year on year increase in demands, and relentless pressure. 

From an employee’s perspective

It is easy to see common themes emerging across many industry sectors: innovation, employee engagement, productivity improvement, cost reduction and customer experience.
As an employee, I mainly experience these strategies as the latest “flavour of the month initiative” to which I may be invited to contribute.  Typically, they have been developed with little or no end-user participation in their design, and are often kicked off with a large fanfare and launch of cascaded workshops and training.  These can range from un-interesting, tick-box exercises, to significant and potentially compelling events.  However, the imposition of the plans, together with the lack of infrastructure and resource to support their implementation often leads to an air of cynicism amongst the very people required to engage in the process let alone embed the necessary changes  into the core delivery processes.  [Long gone are the days when facilitators and coaches are around to help me work with a team delivering change].  What’s more, the pressures of day-to-day delivery, and poor measures , mean I’ll most likely stick to focusing on the day job.  Add in a little fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding my future employment because some restructuring is round the corner, and I’ll probably just keep my head down. 
In this context the barriers to widespread innovation become too high.  Most people, despite seeing the need for change, simply won’t bother after the initial enthusiasm from compelling events wears off, and the realities of the day-to-day work environment resume.

From the organisation’s perspective

It’s clear the need for, and the rate of innovation and transformation, has never been greater.  Yet delivering coherently on this important agenda is challenging. 

Yet some companies are able to perform in this context. Tthe Hay Group Insight global study in 2009 is compelling, showing that organisations with widespread employee engagement are capable of ‘delivering 4.5x normal business performance levels’. 
This is backed up by research released in 2009 of Pfizer’s experience of managing over 20,000 ideas across more than 200 ‘campaigns’ (strategies/areas of focus) within their organisation.  This is also compared with experience from other blue-chip organisations including Bombardier, CSC and Cargill.  Robin Spencer and Timothy Woods’ research shows definitive patterns of value creation across the contributing population:

The conclusions to this are very clear:

• the top 1% of contributors deliver disproportionately to the tune of 20% of value
• but, it is only by achieving widespread engagement in innovation that you access the remaining 80% of potential business value add.

Innovation can take many forms, and it is all these forms that need to be accessed, for example:

• process, product, and customer experience innovation
• what we are doing, how we are doing it, where we are doing it, who we are doing it with, and for whom.

This touches all aspects of the organisation, so the ‘long tail’ of the organisation can and must contribute.  Viable ways must be found to access and sustain everyone’s hearts and minds.  Manual, cascade programmes simply don’t work beyond creating an initial enthusiasm from staff (evidence a consistent 70% failure rate of programmes over the part 15 years).  Thousands and tens of thousands of people and ideas cannot be encouraged, supported and tracked using business analysts, emails, phone calls, and excel spreadsheets.  Very quickly everything grinds to a halt!  Scalable approaches are needed to support the level and breadth of activity involved in wide-spread engagement. 
Traditional interventions must be supplemented by scalable ways of supporting innovation, so people can engage, embed changes, and know where to act through being well informed about business priorities and the contribution towards this. 

Lessons learned

The challenges facing many corporate initiatives can be summarised  as follows:

• Organisational take up is limited, especially when trying to achieve wide-spread engagement
• People and their initiatives have little or no support after the fanfare of the launch
• Leadership are unsighted as to innovation/transformation performance – measures are poor and ability to track these is weak
• The broader organisation, i.e. the ‘long tail’, represents 80% of the innovation value opportunity, and are rarely involved in any effective way
• Leadership do not have a viable way of translating key strategies into transformation programmes that can be effectively executed
• In this context, the costs of the ‘manual’ model are too high and don’t deliver a sustainable or scalable way forward.

A way forward - bridging the gap

It is apparent that an approach which can support both the soft and hard aspects of innovation is required, a system that supports the important, but insufficient, manual work (face-to-face leadership, workshops, coaching, etc.).
Element8 have spent three years developing and proving a solution with clients such as STMicroelectronics, Johnson Controls, Barclays Bank and RBS.  The xpoint™ platform, empowers successful innovation and transformation programmes.  It provides the innovation lifecycles and processes, collaboration tools and associated performance management capability within a cohesive web2.0 environment, so people can work together and take ideas from concept through to business impact.

xpoint™ is unique in how it integrates different and important dimensions.  At its heart it allows individuals and teams to deliver initiatives via lifecycles in a collaborative, open and outcome-focused manner.  In turn, these lifecycles enable insight into the performance of the transformation programme – which initiatives are flying or sinking, which geographies/departments/etc. are racing ahead or stalling?  xpoint™ facilitates concept capture, but it goes well beyond this, accelerating the work of transformation, the translation of initiatives into sustainable business impact.  Because of this it provides a real boost to the engagement process, people can not only suggest ideas, but also drive them forward –true validation of their alignment and engagement with the business imperatives.
So, in summary,  xpoint™ represents a breakthrough in thinking that:

• engages and enables people across the business – their feedback, their ideas, their energy to drive change
• provides a common environment for everyone to take initiatives forward and explore business priorities and issues
• supports the organisational need for constant and diverse types of innovation and transformation activities
• provides much needed live performance insight whilst removing the wasteful overhead of data collation and reporting
• aligns and supports strategic, operational and tactical innovation activity breaks down silo P& L mentality.

Do you need to bridge any innovation gaps?