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.