Continuing continuous improvement
Why high involvement innovation matters more than ever — and how to make it happen
Autumn. Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness — and conferences. That seems to be the pattern right now, take a few days at the end of the summer holidays to wake up brain cells lulled into slumber by the lapping of lakeside/seaside water and soft sunny days. Immerse yourself in a quick dip into new thinking around old and new problems, sharpen up the mental faculties ready for the forthcoming challenges. Which was pretty much the motivation driving me to Hamburg and to a conference entitled ‘Organizing for collaborative innovation’ hosted at the Technical University and convened by the Continuous Innovation Network (CINET).
This event was a little special, representing the 25th anniversary of the conference, and it carried on doing what it has always done, drawing together people from all over the world bound by a common interest in innovation. The innovation question never changes, it is what it always was; how to create value from idea? But what changes, of course, is the context. New technologies, new markets, changes in the shape and expectations of existing ones, new competitors, new regulations — there’s plenty to keep researchers and practitioners awake and wondering all night long and well into the next day.
This year was no exception. Hot topics ranged from entrepreneurial ecosystems, through collaborative workspaces to novel forms of financing corporate venturing. With, of course, the huge elephant which was not sitting quietly in the corner but stomping its footprints over everything — AI.
It was particularly significant for me since I remember the first (much smaller) gathering of researchers, practitioners and policy-makers in a small hotel room near Gatwick airport in the UK. The hot topic which had drawn us together then was the challenge of mobilising employee involvement in innovation.
We’ve always known that employees could be a source of ideas, especially in terms of improving the processes in which they work. Suggestion schemes have been around in some form or other back in the mists of time. Elements of the approach can be found in the medieval guild system where it was used to help develop and improve craft skills and practices. It was an idea which the eighth shogun of Japan, Yoshimuni Tokugawa tried out in 1721 with his ‘Meyasubako’, a box placed at the entrance of the Edo Castle for written suggestions from his subjects. And the British navy pioneered a similar scheme in 1770, asking its sailors and marines for their ideas — significantly reassuring them that such suggestions would not carry the risk of punishment!
By the time of the Industrial Revolution innovation was recognised as a powerhouse — and not everyone thought that ideas should be confined to specialists with the workers simply employed as pairs of hands. In 1871 Denny’s shipyard on the banks of the Clyde began operating a suggestion scheme amongst its 350 employees; it enabled them to cut the time to build a warship from six months to four whilst contributing a variety of other quality and productivity improvements. And in 1892 John Paterson at the National Cash Register company in the USA began exploring ways of tapping into ‘the hundred-headed brain’ of his workforce; his success led the Eastman Kodak company to implement a similar scheme in 1896.
It wasn’t just innovation rates which improved; a growing number of studies, not least in the famous Western Electric research at the Hawthorne plant, found that asking people for their ideas and enrolling them in workplace productivity improvements had the by-product effect of better motivation and employee satisfaction. The great quality management writer Joseph Juran talked about ‘the gold in the mine’, describing how unlocking the potential of employees to add their mental weight to the innovation problem could dramatically improve quality.
The challenge we were exploring at that first conference not about the what but very much about the how. How to move from the rhetoric, the motherhood statements about every employee being creative and able to contribute to actually making it happen. It’s all very well saying, as one manager memorably told me, that ‘the beauty of it is that with every pair of hands you get a free brain!’ — the big question is how to mobilise this. And how to sustain the initial enthusiasm and momentum for the long haul?
At the time we were riding on the back of the latest ‘revolution’ to sweep manufacturing and services, that of ‘lean thinking’. A powerful set of tools and concepts, lean puts employees at the centre of its promise — and finding ways to engage with them was strongly linked to significant productivity improvements achieved by a consistent attack on waste — continuous improvement.
We learned a lot through that CINet network and from many other communities of practice trying to share experiences and good practices. The first key learning was that it’s not a simple binary shift, a magic wand that you wave over your workforce and they instantly become an innovation powerhouse. Instead it’s a gradual building up of capability, installing a version of the innovation process designed to capture ideas from everyone, select the promising ones and implement them — making sure that the loop is reinforced by sharing the gains and embedding the learning.
One of our earliest observations was the ‘honeymoon effect’; it’s easy enough to switch people on, it makes sense to them. They have plenty of ideas, they are closest to the problem and can see how it can be improved, they often have devised their own hacks and workarounds. So many high involvement innovation (HII) programmes began life in this way on a wave of enthusiasm.
Catch the wave and you could be on to a winner. But too often the wave broke on a rather inflexible shore. The ideas flooded in but not all of them were acted on; indeed there could be a suspicion they weren’t being heard. Feedback and progress updates were absent so people felt their ideas had been tossed into a black hole — not the most enabling conditions to encourage people to continue with their efforts. Slogans are all very well but despite the barrage of posters and other reminders of the company’s commitment to listening to and acting on ‘little ideas from everyone’.. the reality was a growing perception of business as usual and of having been bombed by yet another initiative. Keep your head down, it’ll go away and the next one will arrive.
What became clear then was the need for a long-term commitment and the creation of supporting infrastructure to enable these behaviours to take root and to yield fruit. There were success stories but increasingly it became clear that maturity in HII wasn’t a matter of how long you’ve been doing it or even how much budget you were prepared to throw at it. Long term sustainable programmes became part of the fabric of the innovation approach, supported and led, enabled with training, motivation embedded via feedback, rewards and recognition.
It needs to become a core part of the culture — ‘the way we do things around here’ if it is to have a sustained impact and become a strategic resource. And that depends on building nine core capabilities:
· Establishing HII as a core value — little improvements from everyone matter in this organization
· Recognition and reward — this core value is reinforced by relevant incentives (and this is less about money than about being listened to, empowered, enabled to contribute)
· Training and development to support learning about how to be an effective innovator
· Establishing a core process to enable HII to happen — including allowing time and space for it to operate
· Putting in place idea management systems which give feedback and action to ideas
· Facilitation and support for HII — coaching, training, structures, etc.
· Leadership — walking the talk, providing support and commitment in tangible fashion
· Strategic direction — policy deployment where bottom up capability meets top down clear direction about where and why improvements matter
· Building dynamic capability — continuously reviewing and updating the HII approach
All that was a long time ago and a lot has changed. But the underlying challenges — and the promise — remain. If we can find ways to tap into the natural creativity and the deep knowledge which employees in any organisation have then we can take a regular and powerful innovation dividend.
And in times of recession and constraint this has consistently proved to be a key life support mechanism — there may be limits to the appetite for risk in launching new products and services at a time when belts are being tightened and where uncertainty rules the roost. But there’s always a place for optimising, improving, eliminating waste — the original but still very relevant lean prescription.
The good news is that the field has moved on — that constantly changing context for innovation has included the addition of some powerful reinforcements. First there’s massive evidence that high involvement innovation works — cases and datasets regularly point to clear evidence that it has a lot to offer. It isn’t automatic but it is worth investing in. The experience of Toyota and other pioneer firms which have been doing it a long time offers plenty of food for thought; their continued status as one of the companies with the highest productivity growth record over decades is enviable. But there’s evidence from newer kids on the innovation block, confirming the message. Giving people time, space and structure to enable their ideas to flow does pay dividends.
Examples of specific savings at the organization level include:
· Liberty Global’s Spark programme in its various forms has generated around €25m in savings since its inception around ten years ago. Importantly the Spark platform approach is now ‘a household name’ around the company’s global operations. These days ‘….no-one questions our value….’ according to Sarah Kelly, Senior Innovation Manager responsible for the implementation of Spark.
· Conoco Philips’s ’Doing things better’ programme has on a conservative estimate saved over $100m during the past year and many times that over the programme’s life. The difficulty, according to Liz Jolley, Innovation Manager, is that CI is almost invisible, ‘it’s a slow incremental grinding down rather than a big bang…’. But the cumulative impact on time saving, emission reduction, quality and other improvements works out at millions of dollars each year.
· In the BAe Systems Empower programme the savings have been such that the innovation team now has a budget of $1m to invest in supporting ideas through to implementation and they expect to get a return of between five and ten times that sum from employee suggestions
And it’s not just the commercial world; similar stories can be found in the public and not-for-profit sectors. Within the United Nations innovation programmes are proliferating, many of them designed to capture and mobilise ideas from across the organization and especially from those working at the ‘sharp end’ of operations. Agencies like UNICEF, the World Food Programme and UN Global Pulse have put in place extensive support mechanisms aimed at capturing ideas, enabling pilots and then scaling solutions for widespread impact.
Second, the enabling technology has also grown up. In the bad old days there was a limit to how effective an HII programme could be simply because of the logistics of handling so many ideas. There was a real risk that you might become the victim of your own success, convincing people to offer up ideas and then drowning in the sheer volume of solutions which you didn’t necessarily have the infrastructure to help implement. Faced with this problem a number of people began working on IT-based solutions; early attempts were little more than electronic versions of the old physical suggestion box with some rudimentary tracking of those ideas.
But gradually things improved. The interface became more friendly and, with the growth of internal networks, the possibility of accessing a terminal and logging on to a screen became available to many more people. Instead of being a one-way posting process the beginnings of visibility emerged; people could see what happened to their ideas and get some feedback on them.
User companies began to sit up and take notice as a new way of engaging employees emerged — one which offered the twin advantages of richness and reach. Through such platforms a high volume of people could be connected, forming the ‘neurons’ in a potentially giant innovation brain. And their activity could be extended way beyond simply posting up a suggestion; they could comment on other people’s ideas, like or suggest modifications, join into virtual teams building and shaping ideas into real innovation possibilities.
Today’s collaboration platforms have a lot more to offer, not only in capturing ideas but in mobilising knowledge across and between organizations. They do so in an interactive space in which challenges can be posed, ideas suggested, comments added and shaping and welding together multiple knowledge sets and experience enabled.
Where it was once the exception to find firms like Toyota reporting high levels of participation and harvesting the benefits emerging from millions of suggestions, it is now commonplace to find benefits reported in terms of million-dollar savings.
It’s not just the direct financial returns on investment which result from cost and time savings, quality improvements or process simplification which make collaboration platforms an attractive proposition. Their real value lies in the way they enable CI to work at scale and support the entire life cycle of improvement, from initial ideation right through to implementation. And they offer a number of additional benefits including:
○ improved motivation — people respond positively to being involved in innovation and having their voices heard
○ communication at scale — weaving the different strands of ‘knowledge spaghetti’ together to improve overall knowledge management
○ breaking down institutional silos and connecting up the organization
○ making problem issues transparent to everyone because they show up on the platform and can be seen by others
We can think of these as ‘emergent properties’ — the innovation whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts. They give us new and powerful ways of working with the improvement challenge. Not only can we handle the sheer scale of mobilising employee ideas but we can also focus them towards key objectives. And we can do so in ways which yield surprising additional benefits. They effectively turbo-charge our improvement system.
Third, there’s growing interest in the idea of creating an innovation culture, one which offers the agility and resilience to cope with an increasingly complex world and the challenges it throws at us. Whether we are talking about revitalising corporations, re-inventing the public sector or transforming not-for-profit organizations like the United Nations and its many agencies to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, the message is the same. It’s going to come through people — even with AI as a powerful lieutenant the ideas and energy will emerge from a workforce equipped and committed to innovation.
So 25 years on there’s a lot to talk about and celebrate. Not just the longevity of this particular conference but the persistence and power of one of the key underlying subjects — high involvement innovation.
Things have moved on a long way over those years, but the challenge still remains. Talking about high involvement innovation (however refined and well-researched the conversation) is no substitute for actually rolling up our sleeves and doing it…..
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