Demystifying Innovation Culture Efforts is a comprehensive eBook that distills Bob Eckert's and Natalie Jenkins' research and experience down to 12 Strategic Action Areas that leaders need in order to build a sustainable culture of innovation. In this series of articles, we will take each of the 12 Strategies in turn.
Recently, we featured Skill Development, Accountability and Recognition and Key Measurements.
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Series 4: Deep Dive into TECHNOLOGY
Using idea collaboration software or cloud-based solutions to help facilitate interaction and surface new ideas is the sexy new mechanism within innovation management.
TECHNOLOGY MANTRA: Creative collaboration platform that employees/customers can access to enable ideation and problem solving.
In spite of all the buzz and the new technology platforms that enable such collaboration, idea management technologies rarely deliver on their promise. These efforts typically launch with a lot of fanfare and produce a flurry of activity, but because there is often no overall system in place employees become jaded and disengage.
Don't fall for the "Our employees have a lot of ideas. We just need a technology to collect them," statement to fool you into thinking it'll be as easy as that. Click here to read more about what you should watch out for when implementing a technology into your innovation strategy.
Success Tip!
A technology to help with innovation efforts should not be seen as something new, but rather as a robust way to streamline what has always been the method for fostering innovation:
- Listening well to others
- Finding experts you haven't met yet in the organization
- Creating opportunities for interaction around ideas
- Surfacing and prioritizing organizational challenges
- Getting diverse opinions and perspectives involved
- Trusting the wisdom of many minds
Find more success tips here. And keep reading to learn about:
- leveraging technology to enhance your innovation efforts
- selecting an innovation technology platform
- real world examples from two companies
Watch out! Just because you have really smart programmers on staff, capable of designing a customizable idea collaboration system, doesn't mean you should build it yourself. Do a bit of due diligence and learn from the providers in this space. Then ask, "Should we build it ourselves?" Our general advice is not to.
To build a long-term culture of innovation at your organization, technology will be a required component. However, it shouldn't be your starting point. Look at the 12 Strategic Action Areas and assess the amount of effort for each strategy. If you are ignoring or doing very little in the areas of Leadership, Accountability/Recognition and Skill Development, what we call the 3 Pillars, get those areas working first! Read the complete write-up for Technology.
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