Innovation is no longer reserved for those departments and people doing scientific or technological work. In contrast, innovation becomes part of everyone’s life. This needs focussed encouragement. At COE, we offer solutions to help you develop your innovation strategy towards building a Continuous Innovation Mindset. Hence, the following options are in a logical sequence. Although there might be reasons for deviating from this sequence or dropping some or adding other interventions.
Our Individual Innovation Potential survey measures the readiness of Individuals and Work Environment for innovation and change.
Individual Readiness for Innovation includes
Work Environmental Readiness for Innovation includes
As a result, a comprehensive set of reports helps to draw conclusions after the survey and plan for the next steps. This set includes an Individual Innovation Readiness report that is available immediately after filling in the questionnaire. Summary reports are produced for the organisation and for departments if needed. And, all reports comprise some do-it-yourself interventions that address potential issues discovered through the survey.
Based on the survey results, interventions for closing gaps should be discussed and an Innovation Strategy needs to be developed. This strategy may cover the whole organisation if the assessment highlights organisation-wide gaps.
More often than not, interventions need tailoring for different organisational units. Thus, this might be the result of these units having varying tasks that encourage or require a varying degrees of creativity. For example, staff working for Research and Design would see creativity and innovative job behaviour as part of their job, whereas staff working for Finance may not have this role-identity.
Before conducting these tailored interventions, it often makes sense to inform – or better: rally – the organisation into the new era, the era of continuous improvement and innovation.
During our large scale, town-hall like, introductory session, participants experience and learn creativity and innovation in a fun way. And, whilst abiding to some vital ground-rules for creativity, participants apply some basic tools in a very open, yet structured way. This session is designed together with the client. Nevertheless, it usually uses one of our famous process simulations or brings LegoSeriousPlay into action.
After an introductory session as described before, it is important to focus creativity and innovation. Thus, the next step might be to identify problem areas and use Creative Problem Solving (CPS) techniques supported by some Design Thinking tools, for solving these problems.
In conclusion, as any other initiative involving changing processes, regulations, policies or procedures, managing the change is as critical as solving the problems at hand. Without managing change in a systematic way, staff may not support the changes. Hence, innovation may not take place.
Finally, managing the change starts with the leaders and needs support from managers, supervisors and all staff. There are group-style interventions and there are one-on-one interventions we offer to close capability and competency gaps.