An Innovation Website Alone Does Not Make a Company Innovative
In the last 2 weeks I have been fortunate enough to be invited by a number of midsize and large enterprises to present ProVoke and start the dialog of Disruption to Innovation…. And more importantly launching the Culture of Disruption (CofD) as the necessary first step. CofD is a central premise of ProVoke and how we need to approach disruption. My audiences have been mid to higher execs and in 2 instances the CEO of very large companies. Over time in my blogs I will share some great thoughts that emerge from these meetings.
The particular comment that emerged from all groups was that over the last 2-3 years, their CEO has supported and opened up a website, that generally is called the ‘Innovation Portal’ or ‘Innovation Website’. As a first step innovations, and worse, there was no communication back with the employees. Quickly, the employees get disheartened and give up. In fact pretending to be interested in innovation is worse than not doing anything, at least folks are not let down.
Within each company there are thousands of extremely talented employees, engineers, designers and other. Secondly, these people are highly skilled in what they do and thirdly, they understand the customer very well, hence can translate the needs into critical new market offerings.
A CEO might think that it is a total waste of time to solicit innovation ideas from employees (tech companies and other) vs paying uber dollars to frilly consulting companies, but that CEO is dead wrong in many ways. Not only potential innovation offerings could be missed BUT by not connecting back to the employee, it sets a very bad pattern of no caring…A CEO should never be ‘too’ busy to learn from its staff, connect with the employees and harness not only great ideas but great relationships.
In a nutshell, having websites to solicit ideas and innovation from staff should be dealt with the same level of excitement by management as was offered by the employee who shared their idea. Else, shut it down. Done right this is an amazing asset to build a collaborative disruptive and innovative culture. A lot of this we discuss in ProVoke, but this one topic came up so many times this week that I had to share with my readers. What do you think??? Do you have such as website/portal at your work? Is it effective?
[…] interaction…), and then celebrating our success or avoiding our failure in the process. We need to focus more of our attention on innovation and revitalizing our large corporations to become more innovative than we do hyping how companies […]
Information sharing and innovation driven from within the company is as important as knowing your customer’s needs. Having a vehicle for employees to help drive innovation is key and must be embraced from the company culture. Innovative ideas should be presented in monthly meetings to help integrate and get the culture comfortable with idea sharing. Offering a portal to share ideas is important and its use should be encouraged. If not, this is just a dusty suggestion box.
The answers are there
Starbucks website has a section My Starbucks Idea. There are 6954 ideas for ordering, payment and pickup, 12,483 on atmosphere and locations, 9,594 other ideas. Not to mention the 70,000+ food and drink ideas. Some are from employees and some from customers.
The Wisdom god, Woden, went out to the king of trolls…and demanded to know how order might triumph over chaos.
“Give me your left eye,” said the king of trolls, “and I’ll tell you.”
Without hesitation, Woden gave up his left eye.
“Now tell me.”
The troll said, “The secret is, Watch with both eyes!”
-Gardner
Steve, many organizations (including my own) have tried to replicate My Starbucks Idea but with limited success. Dell’s Ideastorm even launched on a similar platform, but lead the company to take some infamously poor product decisions to market!
The struggle isn’t in finding the ideas or even the answers. It’s in knowing the good ones from the bad ones.
Cliff and Steve both have good ideas to get the ideas to the company. However, as we have learned from “the innovator’s DNA”, having or soliciting the idea isn’t enough. You still have to have a method of delivering the idea to the marketplace in a thoughtful, methodical “20 mile” march. We have seen many times a superior idea trumped by a lesser idea with spectacular delivery.
In addition, just as buying an innovative company doesn’t make you innovative, neither does taking a single step in the innovation journey, like inventing a cutting-edge website.
This leads us back to taking the calculated risk to deliver so your innovative website is not the only thing innovative about your company.
Funny you post this as of 4 weeks ago our company posted this type of forum. The catchy name “blueSky Innovation” has been applied with a picture showing someone thinking. The first week this went up there were over 3,000 posts from employees. Review of the posts confirms no responses were ever conveyed from higher management levels. This month the viewer ship has gone down to 500 and there are 73 posts. A portal for innovation without implementation is like the boy who called wolf, next time innovation requests occur it is likely no one will respond.
We do have website/portals at my work however most are for social activities for employees to meet off work. Websites could be very powerful if management rewards the employees for blogging. In a way face books offers a social platform in exchange of information. It does provide a service that people want in order to obtain information. On a website people could share ideas on how to resolve issues this could spark innovation in multiple forms.
Wanna help help save lives? Think that emergency managment, preparedness, response, or mitigation could use an innovative solution to an existing or pending problem? The FEMA think tank offers a real time update of innovative ideas combined with monthly conference call conferences incubate and give ideas legs to run on. Best of all, these ideas will hopefully save lives and build stronger disaster resilient communities and you don’t have to be a government employee to join in.
http://www.fema.gov/thinktank/
There’s nothing wrong with an innovation website, but it is not sufficient to foster innovation. Everyone in a corporation is too busy to review and comment on everyone else’s ideas for how-to innovate, they shouldn’t be, but they are. If the website is where ideas go to die, the website is part of the problem. If it actively engages employees to rally around key innovations, it is part of the solution. I have seen and heard of these systems where employees are given so much stock or so many points to invest in ideas on the site. The ideas that receive a sufficient following will be reviewed and commented on by upper management. Then, employees may spend 10-20% of their time working on any authorized project regardless of their normal role or team.
Can I send the title of this blog to every start-up I’ve ever worked for? It’s amazing to me that companies will spend thousands and thousands of dollars on their websites, and not actually do anything that is posted on that website. Like Joe was mentioning, if a website is where ideas go to die, then that website shouldn’t be there. A lot of times, the website is a nice cop-out for management to “show the company image”. However, it’d be interesting to see how websites will drive innovation in the near future, as having a website has become a company’s existence, and the number one indicator of its presence.
My company has several different ways to incentivize and capture employee-driven innovations. Fortunately, there is no “Innovation Website”! Innovation is inspired, documented, and implemented at every level of the organization. I’m proud to say that innovations that are created at the lowest level have been implemented at the very highest level. And vice versa. Behind our innovation programs are human beings that work hard to understand what problems are being solved and which people/groups might be positively impacted. These human beings also ensure that appropriate executive-level sponsorship is achieved. Those who innovate are rewarded with money, vacation, company awards, promotions, and broad recognition. As a result, the company is #1 in every category within our industry.
None of the companies I have ever worked for have had an innovation website. With the exception of the company I currently work for, I don’t think they were technologically advanced enough to think of such a thing- even if simply having a website isn’t very innovative in and of itself. Where I work now, they have innovation seminars, you can nominate people for awards based on work they’ve done to advance the company or your work environment, and we are looking at adding a budget for some employees to be able to attend different innovative networking events outside of what is offered simply at our company.
An innovation website is only as good as those who proctor and maintain it. Anyone with a little tech savvy can set up an innovation portal themed site in less than an hour. The key is having an ecosystem around the site that supports and fosters its use and then follows up actionably. Employees aren’t going to be motivated to post their ideas unless incentives are in place and they feel that have some power and control over their ideas. Set up properly, with a supporting structure and reward program, I think it is a great idea. Without it, it’s nothing more than another random blog.
I work for a large telecom industry which does a fantastic job of garnering support across the entire organization with its innovation website. By using a stock program to which each employee, management and non-management alike, are assigned the same amount of stock to “invest” in ideas that are posted. This is combined with a social media “Like/Dislike” button and the ability to post comments, questions and provide feedback. The ideas have a lifecycle and must pass certain milestones to continue down the road and eventually reach executive eyes. Thus, by the time senior management gets an idea, they are confident that it’s something that has widespread appeal across the a multifaceted organization.
We don’t have any website at work to track innovation. But having website may help thinking about it, certainly having website alone can’t create the culture. I guess creating innovation culture inside the company is key for innovation. I don’t think people will share the ideas at initial stage, because some want to file patent for the company and make money through rewards. But making those ideas visible after filed for patent could help rest of the engineers to learn about those ideas and implement some of those where ever applicable and build smart device. Definitely having a portal will be a good idea.