How to Deliver Innovation and Idea-Sharing to Your Business
Delivering innovation and ideas to your business depends upon effective communication and understanding of different elements of the process. Successful innovation depends on employing a profitable model of entrepreneurship to help drive innovation. The successful exploitation of new ideas is crucial to a business to improve its processes, and to bring improved products to the market. To deliver innovation to your business, increase its efficiency and, most importantly, improve its profitability.
Create Dedicated Innovation Teams
It is important to remember that there may be employees in your company who are not good at communicating, yet they may have the best ideas to deliver innovation into your business. Therefore, it is important to have a team to support and encourage idea-sharing. If your company does not have the resources, this can be made up of members from different areas in your business.
Introduce an idea-sharing platform
You need to bring employees together to share ideas in person on the right platform, which is important. For example, Dell IdeaStorm (www.ideastorm.com) provides a sharing platform for anyone to submit their ideas, and to comment. And HP organizes brown bag lunches for their employees to encourage their ideas.
Create a screening process for all the ideas
You need to have an idea screening process, so your employees know that their ideas are being considered. This can be done in different ways, a cross-functional team consisting of design, research, and marketing professionals. They are involved in the screening process, and any design failing to achieve a 70% is eliminated automatically.
Employ innovation advocates
Have a team of advocates on board who support the ideas and innovation process. This group will inspire change by asking questions, supporting ideas, and demanding radical changes. For example, create a Phantom group, which supports idea generation and innovation process. This is done by communicating between departments and technologies that could be applied in newly identified areas of the organization.
Encourage collaborative experimentation
Organizations should employ collaborative experimentation to improve the chance of success to deliver innovation. Communicating with stakeholders brings new ideas, addresses market needs, and speeds up the innovation process. An example of this is Google when they made prototypes of products such as Gmail and Google Earth.
Communicate with your employees
Employees need to buy your ideas and know as much as they can about the development of them. For example, use informal coffee talks, and peer reviews to convey the latest innovation developments to employees. Having several venues for sharing, every employee will find a useful source for information about the innovation. This decreases uncertainty and helps people to be open to new ideas in the organization.
Be specific with your communication
Beyond communicating with your employees, you need to let them know the positive outcomes it could bring. For example, introduce online learning courses for employees tied to specific job skills, so each employee could tailor their objectives in learning to deliver innovation to your business. In this way, employees could see how the course offerings applied directly, could then decide how to invest their time.
