Because we are in the Innovation and Idea Management space, thinking analogously about process in our day-to-day is just an occupational by-product – everything that moves or grows has some type of process associated to it. And with that comes the opportunity for continuous improvement. As we like to say in our industry, and because of Omni-present competitive forces, standing still is actually falling behind.

So as the week-end approached and a winter camping trip needed preparing for, I was packing a sleeping bag into the miniature sack it was meant to fit in (presumably inserted by a machine at the factory or my some highly-experienced hands on a production line). I was struggling to fit more of the sleeping bag into the seemingly full sack when I realized that sticking my hand deeper into the sack and pushing from that vantage point actually allowed me to jam more of the %”$”!* thing in; until it was completely packed. Whew!! Upon reflection of  a job well done, I made the link between this banal situation and some of the more common workflow process choke-points; and how typically force in its many permutations is exercised to try and alleviate the impasse - either through:

• Punitive measures such as:
• as being “outed” on a report
• having benefits taken away
• negative entry on an Annual Performance Review
• demotion
• Etc.
• Incentives such as:
• Cash
• Travel
• Merchandise
• Recognition
• ESOP
• Etc.

The sleeping bag analogy is particularly relevant to process innovation and the innovation process, as the targeted reach required to unblock resources (in this simplistic example being space), was the only leverage needed to remediate the blockage. It didn't require anything more than creating space where I thought there was none – I was counting on the pressure exerted against the portion of the sleeping bag already in the sack to do the pushing for me, when in fact, it was fully compressed already; making the chore of pushing exponentially harder. When one looks at the innovation process, this chain reaction not only creates the same resistance, but adds to it  from a human-dynamics perspective; as it produces ambivalence from very people you need engaged - because they are being pushed to do more or work harder when they already are. They`re often not the problem; rather the process is.

Without process innovation to go with your innovation process, pushing ideas down the same old channels will likely deliver the same old results in terms of quality, speed, engagement and overall success.

Leadership and ownership can come in many types and sizes; but whatever incarnation it happens to be in, no one can deny its value as a custodian of a mission and as the principal driver of deliverables; even if the end-goal is as small as one solitary idea.

That is why the concept of Individual Idea Championing has become so powerful to the innovation process; because it provides both the surrogacy and the motivation. Hereunder are three of the most important benefits:

1. Individual Idea Championing ensures that each idea has an owner responsible for its development, collaboration and progression – no matter what the eventual outcome may be. In fact, having Individual Idea Champions is more that the assurance of steps being followed - if properly engaged and recognized, these critical role players will bring the necessary resources to their part of the process to not only accelerate task execution and engage a greater pool of collaborators, their role insures an optimal level of idea development so that the next step of your process can hit the ground running
2. Individual Idea Championing also creates a tremendous distribution of labor; what with numerous and distributed nature tasks associated with each idea’s development, workflows and decision-making, it is increasingly difficult to manage multiple ideas centrally
3. Individual Idea Championing encourages the development owners to seek expertise on demand, rather than leave such important collaboration tasks to the “dumbness” of an automated routing system – after all, who can accurately predict what, when, who, why and how much of nay input such as data, knowledge or expertise an idea will need at any given touch-point of its journey towards a final decision?

Knowing the value that these process role players bring to the innovation process success equation begs a question:

Q. How many of these dynamos can a process have?

A. As many as you can imagine

This is the quintessential scenario of more being merrier - because as ideas begin to be implemented in greater numbers and corporate results confirm their value, idea championing takes-on a whole new momentum; which then feeds on itself. Now imagine that one can begin by having only Individual Idea Champions that are internal – and as your external communities become more adept at participating in your process, a select few could start championing external ideas for you; albeit with limited views, permissions and access to internal company information. You could literally have small platoons of Idea Champions tasking away to develop better ideas ever faster. All you had to provide is the leadership to create the environment.

It’s rather hard to imagine today, but not so long ago was a time when the streets were awash with money. Business was easy: you could buy your way into a good situation; or if things went wrong, you could usually find someone with the money to buy you out of a bad situation. Easy come, easy go. So long as you had access to money, any money, this would somehow get right.

Well as we all know, the opposite is our current reality and organic growth is king. Problem is, some folks if not many have forgotten just how this is achieved – worse yet, some have never had the chance yet to learn. And with the fast-approaching exodus of managers from the Baby Boom generation, the need to get good at innovating with what we have is at a new state of urgency. The intellectual and execution assets are there, but tapping into them to achieve meaningful outcomes will take a major shift in perspective; and engagement.

As corporations go, one of my favorite analogies is that of the circus elephant that is shackled when young – after many un-successful attempts at freeing itself, the animal abandons the effort as the discomfort of the cuff chaffing at its leg becomes too much to endure. Not realizing its brawn as an adult, the elephant mindlessly accepts its fate – despite having the mass and strength to now rip the retaining spike out of the ground in one lazy swoop.

Capital is still required for growth, but maybe we should look at an alternate currency: Innovation Capital

Corporations have an abundance of innovation capital available in the form of collective talent, energy, ingenuity, discretionary tasking and scale that can overcome the same type inertia – if they are properly accessed and channeled. And with the global credit crunch, lackluster economy and anemic employment statistics still ruling the day, the quick and permanent way out of this morass is through the self-determination and organic growth that only structured innovation can bring; regardless of size, industry or any other excuse one can choose to blame.

Can your circus elephant dance on its hind legs? Of course it can; just un-shackle it.

There is an integral ingredient to the Innovation Formula that is often overlooked or intentionally omitted. This CSF is one of the most powerful agents in the development of break-out ideas, yet it is routinely forgotten, or worse, dismissed for fears that one would be sharing information with would-be competitors; whether internal, external or both.

When it comes to innovation, nothing ventured, nothing gained; with the spoils going to the deserving victor. Fears are to be examined for sure, however in this case, you really aren’t taking that big of a risk; here's why:

• Firstly, with the right technology, one can avoid publishing those conversations, collaborations or ideas with just about anyone if one take the time to configure the right vigilance into their process
• Secondly, if one has a well-tuned and purposeful process in place that is supported from the top and has purposeful tasking throughout the organization, your time-to-market will eclipse that of any copy-cay; hands-down

Diversity in your innovation community is the catalyst that enables exciting discoveries and rapid development. This diversity comes in many forms:

How many successful TV shows are written by one person alone? How many cool new cars are the products of a single engineer? How many wild and graphic-rich new video games are produced by one lone programmer? Electronic Arts now has studios in more than a half-dozen countries – is that an accident? The war on talent doesn’t have to be won by acquiring all the brain-power on the planet – simply create an environment around your organization and/or its brands where people with desire, motivation and inspiration can converge to innovate. Give them the assurance of good outcomes, the tools to truly create and the meaningful ties to collaborate – and watch what this creative outlet can produce.

It has been my experience that every so often, I run into people who just know what to say at the right time, luck into the right situations and figure stuff out from a far less complicated plane than the rest of us when they happen to get into a tough spot. In the world of the daily grind, these folks as are rare as Moon Rocks…and represent the exception rather than the rule.

For the rest of us mere mortals, we need intellectual leverage to consistently achieve the same vaunted outcomes.

Lucky for us in the innovation management space, there is a ready-made solution to tap into: It’s called collaboration.

Now as obvious as that sounds, the application and practice of collaboration can sometimes be miss-guided or simplistic; in other instances, it is downright miss-managed. Like with so many other endeavors, the forces of collaboration need to channeled in order to achieve the desired result. This means:

• opportunistic ideation
• purposeful engagement
• relevant workflow routing

To get the right parties together and doing the proper things at the optimal moment is almost akin to JIT procurement logistics; but with many elements of variance thrown-in with the constants to add a layer of complexity. That is why one of the CSFs called for is a highly configurable platform that covers the content, development phases, communications, actions, timelines, follow-ups and measurements of every idea, participant and deliverable in the process. Because the collaboration picture can fast get convoluted, keeping a grip on all the activity so that things happen in the order they were meant to, at the right time and with the proper stakeholders is the glue that hold the innovation process puzzle together.

Having participants engaged based on interest, availability, expertise and serendipity of conversation is a huge accelerator that the right innovation platform can deliver; driving motivation levels, execution and innovation results up in a uniform pattern.

With speed, scale, diversity and complexity as demanding task-masters, the platform is the air that keeps the wings of collaboration aloft.

All too often, what is labeled as Open Innovation winds up being a glorified version of an idea free-for-all. A new rush of un-bridled ideas feeding into the same clogged channels choking their advancement. Open innovation can only work when it’s about process.

1. Collaborative idea building takes advantage of diversity, discrete labor and on-demand expertise – that’s open
2. Flexible processing enables dynamic workflows, contextual status changes and custom tasking – that too is open

By creating an Innovation environment that enables ideas to move in the path of least resistance enables folks to rally around the process organically. Support the whole with a technology that enables the action-ability while covering the natural bases that automation was ideally created for…and what do you get? An innovation process that can not only co-exist with your other corporate activities but one that can actually flourish within them.

This atmosphere can quickly become infectious, or as the management and new-media pundits like to call viral. Dollars are the kings of metrics and until these speak, your process isn’t worth a lick – when running a business with stockholders, that’s priority Number One. The interesting thing that occurs along the way, almost innocuously at first, is the socialization of a process that begins to shape a culture of collaboration. The dollars are the battle, but the culture is the war. And to conquer competition, you need real Open Innovation.

On one of my recent trips abroad, I was walking back to my hotel when I had a moment of reckoning. In a sensory overload, a smorgasbord of imagery, I noticed the mosaic of globalization in one scene. Here I was in one of the Continent’s great cities, watching people walk-by with their iPod buds plugged-in, talking on Nokia mobile phones, jumping into Toyota taxicabs and emailing on their Blackberries. Puma, Burberry and Gucci sported about – welcome to the world market.

This scenario could have played itself out just about anywhere on earth. Because unless you find yourself at a historical revival show, a cultural exhibit or a themed  restaurant, gone are the good old days when one saw lederhosen in Germany, wooden clogs in Holland or kimonos in Japan. Perhaps more noticeably than any other prompt and arguably the first to mobilize and institutionalize global innovation resources, fashion could be looked at as the bellwether of the global innovation phenomenon that now affects everyday items around our orb; one simply has think of their favorite Nike item and where it was designed, made and purchased.

Now for this globalization to create best-of-breed products, innovation has to play a central role – after all, when faced with the choice of buying two products of equal merit, national pride would naturally drive the purchase decision to the brand of one’s own country first; however, if things are not equal, the better product wins regardless of origin.

This dynamic, of course, did not happen on its own and certainly didn’t germinate in the vacuum of nationalistic fervor, restrictive borders or the insular confines of corporate R&D departments – this great innovative expansion required alternate talent and different perspectives; or what I like to call innovation diversity. Our organizations have increasingly diversified their make-up, expanded into new regions and are catering to further-away markets. But the question now is: have we diversified our innovation process? To answer that question intelligibly, we need to look at our innovation bio-sphere and assess its diverse purpose, functions and participants. If we are still doing the same things but with a new group of people, are we getting the maximum mileage from our innovation fuel? Are we engaging people in new and different formats to go beyond mere conversation in order to create measurable value? Are we taking advantage of desires, affinities and availability to leverage our own innovation process?

There is always room for improvement – in the case of Open Innovation, the payoff is exponential. Season’s Greetings to all our readers – here’s wishing you all a safe and prosperous 2010 !!

As an interested wordsmith, I recently discovered an interesting commonality between the words INNOVATION and COMMITMENT: they both take ten letters to spell correctly; and in the natural order of the Roman alphabet, as in real-life practice, commitment always comes before innovation. Now this in itself was not an earth-shattering epiphany, however it did serve as a reminder of how inextricably linked these two words are in order to achieve successful organizational outcomes.

Commitment as it relates to innovation means total engagement; it means investment and it means risk – the essential ingredients necessary for meaningful change. But for innovation to transcend into a cultural norm, smaller yet equally fundamental actions need continuity. The step-off point would be a variation of an popular saying: “welcome to the first day of the rest of your process”.

Q. So once the initial participation prompts have run their course (after launch), what exactly is going to drive and grow your innovation performance? 

A. How people feel about their experiences with it: the clarity, the responsiveness and the outcomes that result from individual participation.

And for that you need process.

A process-driven approach has a critical hallmark as driver: Ideas need to be properly developed in order to keep management engaged – if you’re sending them a paragraph hoping for a go-forward outcome, you are not living in the real world.

Pushing idea development into the broader community and incentivizing participants to meet idea rigor and turn-around standards produces well developed ideas rapidly – SMEs rarely have time for new projects as it is, yet alone the luxury of taking an idea on at the embryonic stages and developing it into something that is decision-ready. With the support of the entire hierarchy and assisted by a community of stakeholders, we can do it for them – if we have total management commitment to the process.

The opportunity to change traditional workflows by engaging the community not only distributes tasking loads, it increases quality and accelerates throughput -  resulting in more time to manage your process, because you’ll increasingly be addressing opportunities rather than re-routing problems or dealing with process choke-points.  This also leverages the availability and eagerness of more people to get involved on their own terms; which drives voluntary participation and enables the leveraging of skills, knowledge and immediacy.

Last but not least, make it worth people’s while to participate – if your organization is serious about engagement to innovation, as most mission statements today profess, back it up with resources and clear upside for participants that bring value to the process. Otherwise, you’re just blowing smoke and everyone knows it.

It has been a personal policy to refrain from including our products, services and clients in our blogging activities. However, I feel that a recent client experience deserves to be shared as a real-world and practical example of the conditions and practices that allow innovation to truly meet its potential.

Prior to moving forward with their process and us as a partner, this is the first question that the CEO of a 10,000 employee organization asked me in front of his Executive Committee: “what is the first piece of advice you can give us?”. I replied: “Use our advice because you’re paying for it”. The message that he clearly heard was don’t cut corners that allow you to fall back into your current comfort zone. To his credit, he took the advice to the letter; and the results quickly followed.

Here is are the simple yet critical success factors:

• The CEO visibly leads the innovation process - makes the commitment to the initiative public knowledge, participates in idea development, collaboration and evaluation – CEO submitted the first idea during launch event and the organization followed his lead in droves
• The communications around the program are exciting, clear, purposeful and sustained – the program is always visible and top-of-mind
• Leadership responsibilizes the hottest “rising star” in the organization and assigns them full ownership of the process and results; and they incentivize that person to drive successful results against targeted goals
• The chain of command is made to fully engage and commit to process rigor, top-to-bottom – they are also made aware that performance is being measured  at every step of the process (including their own) to insure compliance and responsiveness to process-related tasks
• Real resources commensurate to the task are committed – this provides the kind of support that drives optimization of the the effort at every level – the innovation process team is structured and funded for success
• An enticing incentive and recognition structure based on participation, task performance and attainment of success goals is put into place so that participation become an opportunity for all stakeholders that add value – it doesn’t just look like more work – it has the vital “what’s in it for me” factor addressed

Going back to the CEO’s first question, it was asked in front of a less-than  homogenous Executive Committee – comprised of:

• 5 Executive Vice-presidents
• 6 Departmental Vice-presidents
• 8 Divisional Vice-presidents
• 3 separate Labor Union leaders

Those kind of competing interests could easily have derailed the initiative and sabotaged the entire process. The CEO’s active participation and vigilant oversight insured that everyone stayed on track. The CEO made it mandatory for all to get on board in earnest and to be fully committed. To this day it isn’t always easy to maintain...but high achievement rarely is.

Now along the way, there has already been some learning; that too is listened too and acted on, so that the proper adjustments to the process are heralded as an opportunity for improvement - this transparency and fast response builds onto the trust and is re-enforced by senior management communications. This socializes the process even more into a cultural norm, which allows for rapid assimilation of changes and acceptance by the corporate community.

Results in the first ten months since launch:

• Annual idea submission: 92.4% over target
• Annual cost savings: 96% on target
• Annual revenue generation: 57% over target
• Annual employee engagement: 13% over target

One can say what they will, but there is no substitute for commitment, action and follow-through. Those are the core elements that make things happen.

When you think of Open Innovation, what exactly is your definition of open? To many, it means including a greater and more diverse community to submit ideas; which is super, providing you have the capacity and capability to absorb, collaborate and process this increased volume; and of course monetize the effort. If you don’t, you may have just created a big problem; or made an existing problem significantly worse.

To many organizations out there, Open Innovation was intended to be the second coming - a panacea for the ills suffered during their inaugural foray into Innovation Management. Yet the way in which some of these organizations have gone about Open Innovation may just be as naïve. It’s reminiscent of the miss-steps made by media companies during the early stages of electronic publishing - where printed format and content were simplistically migrated to bits and bytes, without much consideration for how different the use-case experiences were going to be. Consequently, it wasn’t the lever that the traditional media companies were hoping for – it took several reflective steps backwards, a slew of scrappy upstarts, the abdication of market share and the of loss mega-profits to realize that what this new media really required was…well…something new. The rub: it wasn’t about the media itself - rather it was the new way people were increasingly motivated to use it.

Will the outcome for Open Innovation be the same? 

If you’re going to truly start innovating, why not begin with the process itself? If our own organization wants to do something radically new, why burden our shiny new initiative by using the same old-school methods that created our current innovation log-jam in the first place? The act of innovation itself requires more than just doing the same thing with a new coat of paint. The process requires change because it asks for change. As the bare minimum, upgrading the process for innovation should be a symbolic first step, a pioneering action setting the example for the rest of the organization – an unabashed demonstration of commitment to innovation.

Alas, process is precisely where most organizations get tripped up – leaving what’s left of the new innovation promise to flounder under miss-aligned legacy workflows. No wonder people get discouraged, loose interest and disengage; nothing has really improved.

Process innovation is the critical first step to getting innovation right – it determines who, how, when, where and what your stakeholders will contribute – and in turn also determines the way in which the organization needs to respond. It’s short-term pain for long-term gain.