Employees allowed time to work on new ideas High involvement innovation groups Employees supported to develop their ideas Using employee knowledge and skills acquired elsewhere High involvement innovation a core value Successful management and completion of improvement/innovation projects
Innovation is popularly associated with research and development (R&D), investment in information and communication technologies (ICTs), and high-profile entrepreneurs. However, this association can be misleading. There is growing recognition that the knowledge, experience and innate creativity of people at every level of the organisation offers an invaluable – and often untapped – resource for innovation and improvement.
High Involvement Innovation happens when employees contribute actively and systematically to innovation in products, services and processes. This often means that they are using and developing different competencies to those involved in delivering their functional tasks.
There are many examples of organisations that reject the notion of a centralised innovation team that operates from the top down. High Involvement Innovation is a bottom-up approach which empowers people, to reflect on past experiences and future challenges, to ask difficult questions, to learn from diverse places and to take part in creative dialogue with a wide range of other stakeholders.
“With every pair of hands you get a free brain” – Peter Totterdill’s interview with Professor John Bessant offers great insights into why employee-driven innovation and improvement is vital for competitiveness, and how it can be embedded throughout the company.
How High Involvement Innovation works
Innocent’s breakfast forum at Fruit Towers
A growing number of organisations argue strongly that new ideas can come from anyone. They often provide employees with regular opportunities to join cross-functional teams which identify and drive forward product or process changes that would otherwise be lost under the pressure of day-to-day workloads. Time-out sessions, ‘down-tools weeks’ and hackathons, bringing people together who otherwise wouldn’t meet, can become fountains of constructive dialogue, creativity and innovation. Opportunities for experimentation and ‘fast failure’ play an important role in shared learning, but depend on removing ‘blame cultures’. For an increasing number of organisations, it means creating dedicated innovation spaces or ‘FabLabs’ that bring diverse combinations of people together, thinking in different ways, sharing technical knowledge and insights, creating new products or services and reinventing work processes. Networks of volunteer ‘guerrillas’, recruited from every level of the organisation, trained in facilitation techniques and empowered to ask difficult questions, also represent a powerful means of building a culture of innovation.
Innovation Forums are an effective means of providing regular opportunities for representative groups of staff to review, generate and action ideas, and can embrace the following roles:
Review and develop ideas generated by teams. Innovative teams can create ideas that have implications for the branch or organisation as a whole. Alternatively the team might be looking for feedback or might just want to shout about a significant innovation or improvements they’ve implemented
Identify innovations. Bringing people together who otherwise wouldn’t meet to share problems and experiences can be a highly effective means of generating new thinking and ideas.
Refine proposals suggested by senior management. Groups of staff on the ground with high levels of operational knowledge and experience provide a valuable sounding board for senior management and general managers. Policies and initiatives can be tested at an early stage to identify and anticipate bugs and to assess impact on staff engagement.
The main rule is that all participants are looking for the best possible argument irrespective of who it is coming from. This means that participants leave their job titles and seniority outside the room, and that all voices are respected equally. Our FreightCo case study offers practical guidance for the establishment of such forums.
Dialogue Conferences are another proven technique for engaging employees throughout the organisation in visioning, stimulating fresh thinking and recognising the value of bringing diverse perspectives together.
There are many techniques for stimulating creative thinking at time out events and team meetings. Releasing Creativity offers nine ideas to help you encourage creative thinking and tap into the collective intelligence of your team, and The Double Diamond explains the pathway between idea generation and implementation within teams.
All ideas generated by employees should receive a considered yet timely response; however the leaders of innovative companies warn against premature evaluation (and possible rejection) of an idea – better to let the originators run with it. At best this may produce unexpected outcomes of real value to the organisation, but at the very least it demonstrates trust and generates shared learning.
FabLabs, dedicated innovation spaces that bring diverse combinations of people together, thinking in different ways, have been created by a growing number of companies as a means of sharing technical knowledge and insights, creating new products or services and reinventing work processes.
FabLabs are spaces which empower employees at all levels to rapidly prototype new objects and products, putting ideas into form with the assistance of the latest technologies, including software and 3D printers designed to work with a wide range of materials and scales.
FabLabs have close links with ‘free and open source’ thinking including the open source software movement, sharing the philosophy that all can be empowered to use and shape creative technologies. They are being created by universities and colleges, by not-for-profit entities in local communities and, increasingly, by companies who want to supercharge innovation by forming spaces where people can think out of the box and collaborate.
Companies across the spectrum have been attracted by the FabLab model or variants of it, allowing them as it does to harness the ‘start-up spirit’ by attracting and empowering those with the best ideas for new products and services regardless of origin. Many large companies have become increasingly aware that size, while carrying many advantages, can become a disadvantage in an increasingly fast-moving market, and the FabLab offers a direct conduit to agile innovation capacity.
Ideation platforms are online tools that enable employees to contribute ideas in ways that are visible to others. Ideas can be peer-reviewed and further developed through online collaboration, often involving dialogue between people working remotely from each other.
Because they are readily accessible from computer desktops, ideation platforms are ideal for capturing spontaneous insights and inspirations. Yet it can take time and considerable effort by platform managers and facilitators to encourage employees to use them regularly and effectively. They are unlikely to provide a complete substitute for face-to-face encounters and will probably work best when trust-based relationships have already been established within a group.
As with all employee-driven innovation and improvement activity, management responsiveness to online idea generation is vital to ensure continuing effectiveness.
Creating high involvement innovation requires a careful balance between leadership direction and example on the one hand and spontaneous animation throughout the organisation on the other. It isn’t a straightforward linear process because it involves changes to deep-rooted perceptions and behaviours across multiple settings and situations.
Given the history of many organisations it wouldn’t be surprising if many managers adopted a ‘wait and see’ attitude. Why take the risk if this is just a passing fad and the old cultural norms gradually reappear? Breaking through this barrier clearly needs more than a statement of intent; it will depend on proactive leadership including the constant repetition of key messages and a constructive but consistent approach to challenging inappropriate behaviours and practices.
There must also be an expectation that constructive challenge and initiative will emerge throughout the organisation. ‘Natural leaders’ and innovators not only need to be encouraged to share ideas but given the space to make them happen.
Experience from other organisations (see for example the Met Office case below) demonstrates the value of recruiting volunteer innovators to identify and lead ‘guerrilla’ actions. Many organisations find that there are multiple opportunities waiting to be seized.
Recruiting, training and empowering volunteer guerrillas can promote a new workplace culture and stimulate fresh thinking by listening and observing;, encouraging reflection and ideas for improvement and mentoring. Guerrillas will stimulate positive and enabling management behaviours by, for example:
actively challenging blame cultures;
pushing decisions downwards;
promoting effective teamworking practices;
creating an expectation of self-management at all levels (with training and coaching support where needed);
challenging silos and demarcations;
focusing on output and confronting long-hours culture;
refocus support services as enablers rather than controllers.
Invitations to join the guerrilla movement should come directly from a senior champion. There must be a presumption that resources will be found to cover involvement in activities rather than requiring applicants to gain approval from their line managers in advance – a process likely to distort the distribution of guerrillas. Negotiations will be required with each guerrilla’s line manager to manage the time and resource implications.
A two-day ‘Guerrilla Academy’ (spread over a month) can develop creative thinking and communication skills as well as aligning actions to organisational goals and priorities; this will play a critical role in their success. Guerrillas will need a further 6 – 10 days a year to identify and undertake improvement and innovation actions.
See how the Met office has used volunteers to drive its innovation strategy:
Be inspired
Our short film provides an overview of how four very different organisations are engaging their people in innovation.
Opportunities such as Down Tools Week at Red Gate Software enable staff to step back from the day job to develop their own ideas for new products and ways of working. DS Smith in Lockerbie created a one-day session for a cross-section of production staff to identify opportunities for improving production flow, and these have now become regular events. In Devon and Cornwall Police innovation forums have generated great ideas for improving the service at a time of financial stringency. Electric bicycles, for example, are a great way of improving visibility while ensuring that officers can cover enough territory in remote rural areas.
Innovative thinking should also be part of the day job and Innocent encourages staff at every level to think continuously about ideas for new products or processes. Being 70% sure that an idea will work is sufficient to get the support needed to take it forward. The Met Office argues strongly that innovation is not a specialised function and rejected the idea of setting up a separate innovation team. A network of volunteer “guerrillas” recruited from every level of the organisation is gradually establishing a culture of innovation in ways that break down silos and release new waves of creativity. Likewise Arginta actively encourages employees to challenge managers when things aren’t working.
MBDA has made long-term investments in developing innovation competencies and behaviour across its workforce. The company’s ‘Innovation Booster’ and other tools supports individuals and teams at the idea generation stage.
Employee-driven innovation and improvement emphasises the importance of aligning the knowledge and expertise of senior teams with the tacit knowledge and experience of frontline workers while recognising and valuing continuing learning. It must also reflect deeper structural practices within each organisation: sustainable and effective employee engagement in innovation and improvement cannot happen in isolation. As in Polpharma it must be driven from the top and reinforced by consistent messages from leaders, aligned with organisational structures and procedures, and underpinned by empowerment and discretion in day-to-day working life. Line management culture and performance measurement invariably play a critical role in enabling, or inhibiting, employee-driven improvement and innovation.
Increasingly the importance of the physical workplace lies in its ability to support serendipitous contact, congeniality and the sharing of tacit knowledge. This is already being reflected in contemporary office design, as you can see in our short film about inet-logistics, an Austrian logistics company.
Saint-Gobain has a global network of FabLabs, all of which display the FabLab charter. The Bristol plant’s FabLab has generated a range of business benefits including prototyping mods to factory machinery as well as to some of their key products – bearings for use in the automotive and other industries. The company invites ‘virtually every employee’ to use the FabLab to put their ideas into form, from manufacturing to marketing, human resources to customer services. Find out more about the company’s FabLab network in this video.
Leopharma’s Innovation Lab – the Leo iLab was established by Leopharma as ‘part of a long-term strategic decision to focus on patient needs’, but is independent from it, including having its own branding. According to its multidisciplinary team, featuring medical experts, AI experts, UX designers, anthropologists, growth hackers, and digital product managers, the iLab combines the best of corporate and start-up worlds. The Lab’s innovation activities focus on improving the wellbeing of people with skin conditions and its products have so far included apps to provide social support, lifestyle advice, and self-diagnosis app for those with skin conditions. The Lab takes a partnership approach, with hubs in the UK, US, Canada, France and Denmark, inviting partners innovation and start-up environments.
Here we are asking you to consider a range of techniques and describe how they can be used effectively to actively engage employees in problem solving and improvement seeking.
Tutor’s tips: Use you project experience and contextualise using the workplace practices to answer this question.
Can you provide examples in which High Involvement Innovation has been particularly effective? What changes do you need to make to your own leadership behaviour and practice to encourage it further?
