Hack:
Using Lean to Create Innovation Culture (or another initiative)

By Deborah Mills-Scofield - Founder at Mills-Scofield, LLC

February 3, 2011 at 10:22am

Innovation

Innovation Process

Management

talent management

21st Century Management

Innovation Culture

lean

Moonshots

Increase trust, reduce fear

De-politicize decision-making

Expand the scope of employee autonomy

Summary

Use previous initiatives to create a culture of innovation, leveraging from those learnings, failings & successes

Problem

"Creating a culture of Innovation" sounds formidable, time-consuming, and 'fuzzy'. Too many companies take on big initiatives that fail so people lose interest, management loses credibility and cynicism for anything down the road increases to the point of virtual impossibility. "Culture of Innovation" is not defined or communicated and the initiative goes up like a lead balloon.

Solution

See what other corporate-wide/business unit-wide initiatives you've done that have taken root, succeeded and leverage those. For example, if you've used Quality or Lean, take advantage of what you learned in that initiative and in the tools used to help create an innovation culture. I"ll use Lean as an example because many companies use it and I've seen it work as a precursor to Innovation:

use the lean tools and networks for innovation events
use your lean planning process (leadership, management, & other levels) to create innovation initiatives & teams
use your lean champion(s) (Lean Manager) as a resource to share tools, coaching, etc. for lean steering committees from the plant/factory through to the front office
review innovation initiatives/progress in your regular lean meetings (monthly, quarterly, etc.) - tracking/discussing results, best practices w/in the company, industry, others and alignment with your overall strategic direction
hold several lean (Kaizen) innovation events/yr

Practical Impact

Several positive impacts from using a previously successful initiative (e.g., Lean) are:

Build off existing excitement & commitment
Innovation is viewed as part of a continuum instead of a 180 from the overall strategy & direction
People are already trained/educated on executing initiatives - including processes, teams, 'tribes', social engagement
Use of tools & learnings from previous initiative enables faster adoption of the innovation culture than starting from scratch because you're using existing learning & people are predisposed

A client of mine that used Lean to do this had some fabulous results. They did buy some new technology to make some of the ideas that came out of the innovation initiatives but because they leveraged Lean (tools, teams, mindset of looking at things differently - focus on not just efficiency but effectiveness!), they had the following results:

created a new manufacturing process (innovated) that created $15M in new sales
created innovative sales models that helped drive business for their customers' customers (talk about real customer value!)
created new financial model, for their own business & their customers', for a previously industry-wide difficult, if not impossible, to do product & service offering that helped their customers with their customers
targeted and invested in a new market before the competition even saw the market

First Steps

To start:

Inventory your initiatives that are working (and ones that didn't) and ask: