Creating an Innovation Culture (3/3): The Ritual

This is the last part in the 3-part series on Creating an Innovation Culture in your company. The first part talked about goal-driven, pervasive innovation culture. To create it, you - as a leader in the company or team - need to first set the right Stage. In this last part, you will see the Ritual to keep the innovation beat going. 

Keeping the Innovation Beat Going

A garden doesn't happen with just the soil and sunlight. You also need to plant seeds, water the plants, remove the weeds, harvest the fruits, and repeat the process. Innovation in your company needs a similar ritual to keep the ideas coming. You can go through the following exercise every 6 to 12 months. Tweak it to fit your environment.

Step 1: Opening Act

1. Choose a specific target or two, driven by business needs
• Lower energy opex by 20%
• Reduce call center costs
2. Define metrics that track progress towards that goal and share them everywhere
• Power bill per month, for each data center
• Number of calls to call center in a day, Average hold time
3. Announce the goal and incentives
• $1000 for top-10 ideas having the most impact on power bill
• CEO award for the most innovative idea to reduce customer calls

Step 2: Action

1. Regularly meet with small employee groups to brainstorm and listen
• Townhalls, team meetings, Friday innovation sessions
• You can use the brainstorming and lateral thinking techniques from my recipe for innovation and some thoughts on next generation innovation
2. Ask people to openly share ideas and seek collaborators
• Create an internal social networking platform for discussing ideas
• Think Jive, Facebook + Wiki, not Sharepoint
3. Provide resources to pilot promising ideas & scale them
• Identify the data center where some of the ideas can be quickly tried out with least impact to business
4. Track the ideas and progress on the portfolio dashboard
• Simple Excel sheet showing idea, team, potential, progress
5. 51% into the program, conduct an event where the Top 10 ideas are presented to the company
• Use this opportunity to also seek collaborators for implementation

Step 3: The Grand Finale

1. Conduct a public event to recognize the winning ideas
• Share the current and projected progress towards the business goal
2. Inform how these ideas will be taken forward for full scale implementation
• Tiger teams, business units, innovator role, what you created as the Stage
3. Launch the next cycle with new goals

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact